The Richter Scale^®

One of my many other projects is an e-commerce web site called Patent Fetcher, which provides a way for folks to download complete PDF files of published patents and patent applications. One of the early challenges I faced was finding an easy way to accept payments for these downloads, for which I wanted to charge less than $1 per document. Enter Bitpass.

That was in July of 2003. Since then Patent Fetcher has used the Bitpass payment platform, which worked much like a prepaid phone card, but for on-line purchases, exclusively for the Pay-As-You-Go Patent Fetcher PDF download service, at 65 cents a download. And while the 15% cut that Bitpass took on all purchases was a bit steep, they tended to be very responsive to my unique requirements, adding numerous features to Bitpass for corporate use (as a large percentage of Patent Fetcher users are law firms and large corporations).

However, they were either before their time, or had grander aspirations (and expenditures) than their revenue stream could support. Plus, as their focus was media, they found themselves in competition first with Apple’s iTunes, and then later a bevy of other services which sold content for small amounts of money.

Regardless of the of cause of their demise, last night at 5:52pm EST, I got the following e-mail from Bitpass:

Dear Valued Bitpass Merchant,

We want to thank you for your past business, however due to circumstances beyond our control, we are discontinuing our operations. 

We have partnered with Digital River to provide operational support during the period prior to shut down.  As of today, January 19, 2007, all Bitpass Buyers with US dollar denominated accounts are being notified that they will have seven (7) days to spend any amounts that currently exist in their Bitpass Account. 

During this seven day period, US Buyers will not be able to add additional funds into their account. 

On January 26, all US Bitpass Buyer accounts will be closed and we will begin the process of refunding all unspent monies to the accountholder.

Bitpass Merchant Accounts will be available for viewing until February 28, 2007.  At that time any funds that you have on account or owed to you will be refunded or paid.  All account records and materials will be retained for 60 days and available upon request. 

Again we would like to thank you for your business and support. 

Matthew Graves
Chief Operating Officer
Bitpass Inc.

Our long time customers got the same message at approximately the same time. Talk about a Friday night surprise for all of us. Bitpass was a good thing while it lasted, but giving merchants more notice than consumers would have been greatly appreciated and desired. Instead, Bitpass merchants like myself have to scramble to communicate with our customers and deal with a sudden and near instant loss of revenue until alternatives can be found.

I ended up spending much of Friday evening trying to come up with a stopgap measure that would still allow my customers to use Patent Fetcher, and be able to continue to charge them for the downloads. Most important was to ensure minimal problems for Patent Fetcher users, so I made the service free of charge until I can develop an alternate payment platform. And this time I will bite the bullet and just do my own credit card processing instead of relying on an expensive, yet convenient, proprietary third party solution. On the bright side, this failure of Bitpass forces me to develop and complete some long overdue functionality for Patent Fetcher and should make it a much better service in the coming months.

Lesson learned: Don’t rely exclusively on proprietary technology, no matter how cool.

I admit (and am sure have admitted before) that I am an Internet junkie. Call it an obsession. That’s why I have two data phones (a Blackberry for Bonaire, a Sidekick 3 for everywhere else), a monthly subscription to T-Mobile Spot and Boingo (for WiFi), a T-Mobile GPRS/EDGE data card for my notebook, and Cingular’s GPRS/EDGE service built into my notebook. The latter two services work fine, but they are slow to connect, slow to disconnect, and just slow in general. Enter Sprint.

I had been seeing ads for Sprint Mobile Broadband for some time in USA Today and on the recommendation of good friend and networking guru, Daniel Senie, I committed to the Sprint Mobile Broadband service while in New York City the week before Christmas.

The Pantech Wireless PC Card that the Sprint store on Broadway sold me (net cost about $65 for set-up, with a $59.99/month fee for two years) installed easily in my notebook, and a few hours after I purchased the card I was on-line in my hotel room at Times Square. All I can say is “Wow!” - the download speeds I was seeing were about as good as the wired Internet connection in my room (which was $14.95/day). And while Sprint’s detractors have suggested that Sprint’s coverage is lacking, I’ve found no such problem in all the places I have wanted to use the card: New York City, La Guardia airport, Boston, San Juan, Las Vegas (daily this past week), and Miami (right now).

The only place the card was sluggish was during a press conference at the Sands Expo in Las Vegas about five days ago during the Consumer Electronics Show, and that was no doubt due to many others on the same cell using the service. In my hotel room in Vegas the Sprint data connection performed flawlessly, at high speeds - saving me $11.95/day for hotel room Internet access. And here in Miami, I’m able to watch my Texas DirecTV connection via my Slingbox Pro (more on that in another post) without problems on the Sprint Mobile Broadband connection.

And. on top of that, the time it takes to plug in the Sprint PC Card and establish a data connection is typically less than 30 seconds, compared to 1-2 minutes at least for the Cingular data service built into my computer. Same goes for shutdown when I want to hibernate my notebook (like when the flight attendants give me stern looks to suggest that NOW is the time I need to shut off my notebook in preparation for take-off).

I think it’s time to cancel my $80/month Cingular data service. And perhaps my Boingo service too, as less and less places seem to allow roaming with Boingo. T-Mobile’s a keeper as it works at just about all Admiral’s Clubs (although in San Juan, the Sprint Mobile Broadband connection is faster), Starbucks, and Borders Bookstores, among others. The T-Mobile unlimited data service is only about $30/month, so as a back-up which will work overseas, that’s not unreasonable. I understand that Sprint will not work overseas.

It should also be noted that the Sprint PC Card I have supports the Sprint EVDO data network, using the EVDO Rev. A system. The previous generation EVDO Rev. 0 system is not as fast, which is another thing to look for if you decide to follow in my (large) footsteps.

I give the Sprint Mobile Broadband service a 9.5 out of 10.0 on The Richter Scale. The only thing that could make it better is a lower price. Bravo Sprint!

One of the more creative PC game input devices I have seen in some time (and first reported on here), is the Novint Falcon.

At CES here in Las Vegas this week, Novint finally announced a ship date and pricing for the device. The Falcon will ship on June 18, 2007, and is available for pre-order now in a limited edition bundle at http://www.novintfalcon.com for a price of $189. The pre-order bundle includes the Novint Falcon game controller device, a copy of Newton’s Monkey Business (a set of mini-games strangely reminiscent of Super Monkey Ball on the Nintendo Wii), a free game download from Novint’s Online Game Service and membership in the Falcon First Club.

The full retail price of the Novint Falcon will be $239 when it ships in June.

What makes the Novint Falcon so different is that it is a haptic device, meaning that it provides physical feedback. For example, in the Half-Life 2 demo I tried, I could actually feel the recoil when firing various weapons because the Falcon would jerk up and to the right, just as a real gun would. Similarly, when opponents were firing upon me, the controller would jerk in a direction to indicate the force of being hit, allowing me to quickly locate the source of attack. The use of the Falcon is very intuitive, although I suspect that with extended game play my arm would tire. Although, arguably, that means it might be good exercise too.

The launch price for the device is significantly higher than the $99 price Novint had bandied about last May at the E3 Show in Los Angeles, but for a haptic device of this complexity, probably not unreasonable. The biggest challenge that Novint faces is getting game developers to support their device natively in PC games, but they assured me that they were working on that effort.

I certainly look forward to playing with it when it ships because it really is one cool device. And I hope they overcome the market hurdles such innovation and uniqueness tend to face.

This morning, here in Las Vegas at the start of the Consumer Electronics Show, LG Electronics announced that they will be shipping the first multi-format DVD player during the first week of February, 2007 via retail channels including Best Buy and Circuit City.

The new LG BH100 player, which goes by the decidedly cryptic name of “Super Multi Blue Player”, will retail for $1,199, and offer playback for HD-DVD, Blu-ray, and standard DVD media using a single tray. Full 1080p output, HDMI out, and support for a variety of codecs (VL-1/H.264, DDH, DTS HD, and True HD) is also included. The new player uses a sophisticated beam mirror system (pictured above) to direct the different color laser beams required by the various formats.

LG’s Chief Technology Officer, Dr. H. G. Lee, said that it has been widely perceived that there has been much slower adoption of high definition DVD players, and that LG believes unification between the competing HD-DVD and Blu-ray standards is possible. LG believes their new BH100 player is a first step towards that unification, and should help consumers overcome the hesitation in committing to high definition DVD playback, because now they don’t have to choose (although they will need to pay a small premium, of course).

LG also announced the GGW-H10N Super Multi Blue Drive, an external drive for use with PCs which features support for reading and writing Blu-ray media, DVD, and CD, and can also play HD-DVD. This unit will be available for $1,199 as well, sometime later in Q1 2007.

While the price of the BH100 is not insignificant, it is still cheaper than buying two separate standalone players (and about the same price as buying both a PS3 - which features Blu-ray, and an Xbox 360 with HD-DVD drive separately), and no doubt the price will come down as volumes increase and as other vendors release multi-format players. I only wish LG had chosen a better and more descriptive name, like “Universal High Definition Disc Player”.

There were already a number of hints last week that LG would be announcing a multi-format player at CES. Companies and people who had opted to support one of the two HD formats exclusively had guarded comments, but in some cases expressed concern that LG’s product would further delay the eventual success of their chosen standard, and the demise of the competing standard. The same concerns rang even louder when Warner Bros. last week also announced a dual media disc - the Total High-Definition Disc (or THD), which will play in both HD-DVD and Blu-ray players.

Both products are excellent for consumers, however, and as consumers are the ones who fund the consumer electronics industry, it’s wise to provide products which make consumers happy (or at least less reluctant to adopt new technology).

As an active (some might say hyper-active) consumer of digital media I find DRM (Digital Rights Management) to be annoying at the very least, and downright malodorous at worst. DRM is what prevents you from playing downloaded music from _________ (insert one of: iTunes, Napster (new one), Yahoo Music, Real/Rhapsody, etc.) on any device or platform you want, any time you want, for example.

And DRM is not limited to only music - it applies to eBooks (like those for my Sony Reader or the occasional standards documents I need to purchase from IHS/ANSI); videos (iTunes TV shows, for example), and movies (e.g. Xbox Live movie downloads which can only be stored for a few days, and played only a few times; Microsoft’s Vista operating system will require LCD (or other) displays to have HDCP - High Definition Copy Protection - in order to play back HD video content from Blu-ray and HD-DVD; Apple’s new iTV with iTunes; and the reason I cannot watch TV shows at ABC’s web site while back home on Bonaire because I am outside the U.S.).

The truly scary thing about DRMed content, at least to me, is that the company I bought it through could decide at some point that my right to view or listen to the content should be terminated, and there’s not much I could do about it (other than keep computers in Internet isolation, perhaps). Or that some technological mishap prevents me from playing purchased media forever.

And then there are changing standards and allegiances, as witnessed by Microsoft’s desertion of all of its Plays For Sure partners when the company decided to release the Zune player.

The big media publishers are driven by fear - fear of loss of control, fear of lost revenue, fear of alienating their artists - and that fear has more or less paralyzed them. Their knee jerk response has been to vastly restrict how digital content can be purchased and used, combined with an effort to scare those who don’t respect (or are ignorant of) intellectual property rights into submission. The result is an alienation of their customers. Like me.

With the rare exception of a TV show I may order and download from iTunes for my video iPod, knowing I will only view it once, my form of protest to DRM has taken the form of either viewing/listening to the material for free or simply purchasing physical media that I can play anywhere, anytime, and rip to my computer hard disk if I so wish. And apparently I’m not the only one doing this as is evident from the growing indications that the music industry is looking at options for selling non-DRMed MP3 music files to boost their electronic sales and also reduce their dependence on the monster they created - Apple’s iTunes.

A December 7, 2006 article in USA Today offered one of the first hints of this as Yahoo Music became one place where an MP3 (which is by definition not DRMed) file for a Norah Jones song as well as one from Relient K became available for sale.

Then, a couple of days ago, Billboard magazine (as republished by Yahoo News) released further hints that DRM is being reconsidered by at least some music publishers, especially under pressure from some large on-line sites, such as Amazon.com and MySpace.

I, for one, would be right there with my money in hand to buy non-DRMed MP3 music files at a reasonable price - like $0.50 each - and I suspect that folks who now knowingly steal music for their collections but have the means to pay for their music would do so to to be legal and support the artists they like.

Lower priced, unrestricted music files, combined with a marketing campaign to make the artists seem a bit more human and approachable would do wonders for the music industry, and perhaps create a revival for digital music at large.

A couple of weeks ago in New York City I was lucky enough to score two Nintendo Wii consoles with merely a 2 hour wait in line at the Times Square Toys R Us. I received a ticket to purchase a console when I joined the line, and I roped in my nine year old son to get a ticket too. See pictures below of us in line, along with some new friends, with our tickets; Wii boxes stacked up at the Toys R Us; and my son Bas and I with one of our Wiis.

One of the Wii consoles has been sent on home to Bonaire via slow boat, but we managed to install the other one last week at the in-laws while visiting for Christmas, and it was great fun. We now have the same Wii set up in our living room on our big screen and it’s still fun.

Nintendo has, in my estimation, never been stupid - foolish and foolhardy yes, but not stupid. And the Wii is no exception. While the Wii has been derided by game mavens as having mediocre graphics, the fact is that the Wii is designed to be used with just about all existing televisions. Okay, so it doesn’t look as crisp and awe inspiring as an Xbox 360 or PS3 running in high definition with an appropriately designed game title and all the right cables, but most real folks don’t have HD TVs yet.

So, in contrast to the Sony PS3 and Xbox 360, for which an HD TV is pretty much required, the Wii is effectively plug and play with current display technology (but get a component video cable if you want to get a bit better resolution out of it on a newer TV). And from personal experience, you don’t notice jagged pixels or fuzziness when you’re madly shaking your hands and arms to make your character on the screen run, jump, or whatever - you’re too busy playing the game using the Wii’s innovative input devices.

The three titles I have found so far that make the best use of the Wii remote (and Wii nunchuk in some cases) are the free Wii Sports game disc which comes with the Wii (features Baseball, Tennis, Bowling, and Golf), Excite Truck, and Super Monkey Ball. And the latest Zelda (Twilight Princess) is good too, but it takes quite a bit of game time to get to where you are using the wireless motion controls in a broad range of ways.

Super Monkey Ball in particular features 50 mini-games ranging from darts, running hurdles, races, space shooters, tightrope walking, and much much more. But even Super Monkey Ball probably only scratches the surface on original ways game developers will likely put the wireless controls to use in the future.

I have read and heard a fair bit of commentary from naysayers that the Wii is just a fad, and recreational gamers will soon tire of it, but I’m not so sure. There’s something very satisfying about being able to physically interact with a video game, whether it be swinging a control like a golf club in a golf game, playing tennis with the control as a racket, throwing darts, or even pointing the remote at the screen as an aiming mechanism for some weapon in a first person shooter. Certainly it’s a lot more natural to point your “gun” at a target than it is to use a joystick to rotate your view so that your cross hairs then line up on your target.

And while reports of television destruction and bodily injury from flailing arms, snapping Wii Remote restraint cords, and sweat-induced slipperiness abound, the experience in my family is that the greatest pain resulting from use of the Wii controllers is the day after vigorous play - muscle aches being the most common malady.

I am firmly convinced the Wii will outsell the PS3 and Xbox 360 by mid-2008, if for no other reason than it will work very well with pretty much any TV already in use today, as well as new ones being purchased, combined with the fact that it’s much more attractively priced than the higher end alternatives, meaning it’s more accessible to a larger number of people. It also doesn’t hurt that the game titles available for the Wii are much more family friendly than those for the PS3 (and to some extent, the Xbox 360), at least as things stand now.

I give the Nintendo Wii a 9.0 out of 10.0 on The Richter Scale.

One of my New Year’s resolutions is to start reading the freaking manual of any new device and gadget I get (and I have a lot of those in my queue right now). In geek lingo, that’s know as RTFM (and the “F” means something rather more crude than “Freaking” in case you hadn’t guessed.

This all stems from the fact that when we bought the house we are living in now, we remodeled and added ceiling fans to every room in the house. But, Bonaire has flaky power, and for the last two and a half years we have been attributing the fact that the remote controlled lights in the ceiling fans are sometimes dim and sometimes bright (changing over a period of months from one to the other, or at least so it seems) to that power instability.

So imagine our surprise when a couple of days ago we discovered that if we hold the “light” button on our ceiling fan remotes, the corresponding ceiling fan’s light actually dims or brightens gradually over a 10-15 second period from one extreme to the other. We have had dimmer functionality in the lights all along and never known it. Why? Because we didn’t RTFM. So, from now on, I will RTFM, even when the device is seemingly trivial, as everything is definitely not always as simple as it seems.

Google yesterday announced a new feature - searching and displaying U.S. patents. And as with everything Google does, this new feature is well implemented and easy to use.

The location for the Google Patent search is http://www.google.com/patents.

You can do full text searches on published U.S. patents (published U.S. patent applications and non-U.S. patents are not supported at this time, but Google has indicated that those may be supported in the future).

When you get a result list back from a search and click on one of the results (which will be a patent), you then have the option to read the patent pages, as well as search further in that particular patent - a very nice feature. If you opt to read the patent pages, they are brought up in special Google-developed viewer, with search terms highlighted on the page - also a very nice feature. However, it’s only as good as the OCR quality, as I discovered.

With my Patent Fetcher hat on, I am a bit relieved that Google is not offering PDF downloads of resulting patents, although frankly that would be a nice feature to have.

While dedicated patent search sites like Delphion are still far superior in some of their search capabilities compared to Google Patent Search, Google’s new search offering is vastly better than what the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office offers for issued patents, and certainly its patent viewing feature is very useful too.

More details to be found at http://www.google.com/googlepatents/about.html.

I finally got back home to Bonaire last night, and had my new PS3 waiting for me. I installed it using the regular composite video cable the PS3 comes with on the Samsung 32” LCD TV in my bedroom. I used the composite video cable because the TV only has one HDMI port, and that port was already in use by my DVD player.

Sure, I could have just gone and disconnected the DVD player, and used the PS3 to play DVDs instead, but that is a suboptimal solution, because the user interface for DVD playback on the PS3, well, sucks. Also, I have the DVD functionality programmed into my universal remote, and am too lazy to figure out if there’s a way to get the remote to work on the PS3.

I had anticipated this issue some weeks back, and had gone shopping on-line to find an affordable HDMI switch, as surely such an item must exist. And indeed, I found several options. I finally settled on a 5-port HDMI switch I found at Amazon.com from a third party seller.

That switch arrived today, so I unpacked it, rewired things, and found that for some reason the PS3 would not output image data onto the HDMI connection. Turned out to be a configuration issue in the PS3, so I switched back to the composite video view (which, incidentally, was really ugly relative to what I knew the PS3 could do - fuzzy and chunky graphics at 480 lines of resolution - yuck! Oh how spoiled we’ve become!), and reconfigured the PS3 to use HDMI as the output. My Samsung TV could do 720p and 1080i resolutions, testing showed, so I enabled that, and was off and running, and things looked oh so much better.

However, this would not have been possible without the 5-port HDMI switch I found at Amazon.com - it’s still not cheap at $124.99, but it works like a dream. More specifically, it auto-senses which of the five HDMI inputs have an active signal, and if it’s only one, switches to use that input automatically. That means it is wife-safe too. My wife is no dummy, but she hates it when she has to take extra steps to get something working like it used to, and with the 5-port HDMI switch, if she turns on the DVD player, and the PS3 is off (as it would likely be), it will all just work as it did before.

The 5-port HDMI switch is made by Monoprice, and the model number is HDX-501. It has five HDMI inputs, and one HDMI output. The specifications say it supports 480p, 720p, 1080i, and 1080p video formats, and that it also supports HDCP compliant video devices - something that is necessary for both 1080p output for Blu-ray movies on the PS3 as well as for some of Windows Vista’s forthcoming features. The unit comes with a remote controls, and a pair of AAA batteries are included as well.

I give the Monoprice HDX-501 HDMI Switch a 9.5 out of 10.0 on my Richter Scale. The only way to improve on it would be a lower price.

An interesting techie anecdote about HDMI switches, incidentally. I was in Tokyo last week, and visited Akihabara, the Tokyo electronics district, where every gadget known to man can be purchased. However, in asking around (using my Japanese-speaking guide, Junko) I was unable to locate any HDMI switches of any sort. We visited about a half dozen stores and stands, and in the final shop, that of one of the larger computer sellers in Akihabara, we were told point blank that while they knew HDMI switches existed, they did not yet exist in Japan. I found that statement amusing, since Japan is always apparently at the bleeding edge of technology, and the U.S. trails behind. Here was a case that appeared to be the opposite. In any event, in the U.S. you can definitely find HDMI switches. Ones that work well, at that.

Back in January, I covered the unveiling of the Sony Reader at CES in Las Vegas. At the time I thought it was a novel idea (pardon the pun), and wanted to spend some time with one. (See picture below of the Sony Reader, courtesy of Sony)

I finally got my wish - I ordered one back in August, and early November, I received my very own Sony Reader (and yes, I did pay for it). I have spent the last few weeks exploring its uses, benefits, and shortcomings and want to share those with you.

Let’s start by what the Sony Reader is, and then continue on with what it isn’t but what it wants to be.

What The Sony Reader Is
The Sony Reader is a piece of technology which can substitute as a book, or better yet, a collection of books. The internal memory stores a respectable number of pages in the form of one or more eBook files, and external memory in the form of a Memory Stick Pro or SD Card can add up to another 4GB of storage. Unless you are a total speed reader, that’s enough to keep you in words for years.

The Sony Reader uses a “digital paper” (a.k.a electronic ink or eInk) display which provides decent contrast in a reasonably well lit environment. Unlike a traditional electronic display, the digital paper consumers power only when the contents are changed, and as such Sony rates the Reader as being able to support 7900 page changes on a single charge. I have found that number to be unrealistic in the two times I have run out of power - I’m guessing (without having done any detailed experimentation) that in practical use, the number is maybe half that - maybe 3500-4000 page changes.

Because of the size of the pages (in order to keep them readable) a book which might perhaps be 300 pages in paperback might be closer to 700-800 pages (or more if you select the Medium or Large text display modes), so that means the battery use number is a bit misleading, as a typical Reader eBook has more pages than the paper equivalent. In other words, less books per battery charge.

Also, because of how the digital paper works, to change page content, the Reader needs to wipe the whole page to black and then draw the page. This causes a weird flashing effect which at first is annoying, but you quickly learn to ignore and then don’t even realize it’s there. It does make page “turns” rather slow though.

The best looking content for the Sony Reader naturally comes from Sony itself via Sony’s CONNECT service, which is integrated into the CONNECT Reader application which comes with the Sony Reader, and if you want to manage all of the content of the Sony Reader, that software is the only way to do at this time.

The Sony Reader comes with several eBooks preloaded, and excerpts from a number of others. Also included in the Reader is a PDF of the user’s manual, some pictures to demonstrate the monochromatic picture viewing capability of the Sony Reader, and some sample music files (the Sony Reader can play digital music files, but in a severely limited way - see below for more).

When you register the Sony Reader, and authorize the CONNECT Reader software (it can be installed on up to five computers, and you can also authorize several Sony Readers to view DRMed (Digital Rights Management) content), you also get a $50 credit at the CONNECT eBook Store. Sadly, even with the average 20% discount Sony provides on eBooks, they are still extremely expensive in my opinion.

Current titles can range in the $10-20 range, which I think is pretty ridiculous considering you cannot give the eBook to anyone else when you’re done with it, unlike a paper book and the overhead in releasing an eBook is minuscule compared to the cost of printing hundreds of pages on paper and then dealing with traditional book distribution channels.

Although, I will say that the $50 credit does help offset some of the initial umbrage at the cost of eBooks published by Sony CONNECT.

The Sony Reader promotes the ability, as an alternative, to display text, RTF, PDF, and Word files, as well as RSS feeds from Blogs is also somewhat misleading mainly because you end up losing real functionality when you try and import any of these file types.

For example, with text files, you need to provide text in paragraphs without a carriage return at the end of every line, otherwise you will likely end up with incredibly difficult to read pages with alternating long and short lines due to automatic wrapping.

With RTF and Word DOC files, you need to perform quite a bit of reformatting to get the files to be even moderately readable on the Sony Reader, and then includes font formatting too. And you have to have Microsoft Word installed on the system you use to import the RTF or DOC files into the Reader.

And don’t even get me started on PDFs. The display of the Sony Reader is pretty low resolution - perhaps a quarter or a third of a typical letter size page looks best on it. Now imagine shrinking a letter size page with typical 12 or 10 point type down to that size. If you imagine it must be difficult to read because everything has shrunk down to a much smaller size, you’re right. Most folks don’t have the expensive full version of Acrobat so they can’t make their own PDFs, but even if they could, extensive experimentation is required (and after a couple of hours I gave up).

And the promise of being able to download blogs is a laugh. There’s no way (at least not that Sony provides) to do it with just any blog. Instead you have to use the CONNECT Reader software and select among a very limited set of RSS feeds to fetch and convert to the eBook format, but in my tests I found that several of the referenced feeds (including Boing Boing) are no longer supported, and those that area produce horrifically formatted and almost unreadable output.

If CONNECT Reader was the only way to get eBook formatted files for the Sony Reader, I probably would have returned it. However the Sony Reader was not the first eBook Reader from Sony - they used to offer a product called the Librie. And it was out long enough that a number of enterprising developers have created some rudimentary tools to create LRF (non-DRMed eBook files) from text files and web pages.

In fact, the text to eBook converter tool I tried from the Yahoo Librie group downloads area (need to join the group first) is designed to take text files from the Gutenberg project (http://www.gutenberg.org) - a repository of thousands of book texts that have ended up in the public domain because their copyrights have expired. That includes works of folks like Mark Twain, Shakespeare, and countless others. So, if you don’t mind doing a bit of extra work, and like to read classics, this is a real option. Although with the Sony Reader eBook selection menu, it might take you a while to navigate through your book lists sorted by title, 10 titles to a page.

Another developer created an HTML to LRF tool which I found does a much better job of snagging blogs, albeit in a more unorthodox fashion as it doesn’t process RSS feeds, just the web pages. But it’s still not ideal for just that reason.

In any event, there are more tools being developed regularly for the Sony Reader/Librie, and I have high hopes that better looking eBooks from a large variety of sources are not far away. These tools will also make it possible for authors to self-publish for the Sony Reader, albeit without DRM (which is probably a good thing).

What The Sony Reader Is Not
Sony, for some reason I can’t fathom, built an MP3 player into the Sony Reader, but did such an incredibly poor job of it that they should not have bothered - it would have also probably saved a small bit of money in terms of additional components.

As I had previously noted, the Reader can take Sony Memory Stick Pro and SD Card media, and you can copy music onto those cards either directly or via CONNECT Reader. That part is fine. However, when the Sony Reader figures out what music it has available for play, it sorts it all in alphabetical order. There’s no way to set up a play list externally or internally, or sort by artist or album. The Reader simply starts playing the track you select and then continues with whatever the next song is alphabetically.

Furthermore, while you can read an eBook while the music is playing, the control interface to control the music is the same one used to navigate pages for reading, so once you move to eBook reading while music is playing you lose the ability to skip tracks, pause, rewind, etc. All you can do is control the volume unless you want to back up to the menu to switch to the music player interface.

The Sony Reader also includes a picture viewer, and that works a little better as long as you don’t mind your pictures being black and white and somewhat grainy. You can also set up a slide show to show images. I don’t see this as a particularly useful feature, but at least this one is a variation of viewing pages as opposed to the quirky MP3 player which just doesn’t belong (in its current incarnation) in the Reader.

Usability
Using the Sony Reader also takes some getting used to. There is an on/off switch, but instead of conserving battery life, it’s real purpose appears to be to prevent the buttons on the front of the Reader from doing anything if pressed by accident (something that is incredibly easy to do when you put the Reader down or put it in a backpack or pocketbook).

The Sony Reader also comes with removable/replaceable cover which protects the display, but in order to use the Reader you pretty much have to fold the front cover back behind the Reader instead of holding it open like you would a book. That’s because the only buttons to change pages are on the inside edge of the reader (either the two page buttons near the left edge, half way down in the image above, or the round button near the left bottom. This whole configuration makes the Sony Reader somewhat unnatural to use as a book replacement, although even this issue is overcome with time. Ideally the Sony Reader should have previous/next page buttons on the top (so you can hold the Reader with one hand when reading) and on the right side too, so that people who want to read it more like a book can do so.

The menu button and joy stick at lower right take some getting used to as well, especially in that it takes a number of painstakingly long seconds to get to a menu once you hit the menu button, and in fact perform any command.

The number buttons along the bottom of the screen have two purposes. The first is to provide a quick way to select a number menu function when a menu is present. The second is to go to a page in the eBook when you’re in reading mode. But no, you don’t punch in the page number you want to go to. Instead, if you press the 1, you go to the first page in the book, and the 0 gets you to the last page, and the buttons in between get you to an interpolated page number (5 is the middle of the eBook, for example). This means that if you accidentally brush one of the number buttons while reading you can pretty much end up somewhere completely different in the book. Then you have to go to the menu, select the History option and figure out what you really were last looking at before you jumped elsewhere and then go there via the history menu.

One feature I do like, however, especially as someone who has a combination of books and documents on the Sony Reader and reads some of them in parallel, is that the Reader remembers what the most recently read page is for each book you have looked at. That saves battery chewing page flipping to find your place (which is why I would do it with a paper book if I lost my bookmark). And speaking of bookmarks, there is a bookmarking feature as well.

Most of these nuances and annoyances are just a matter of getting used to the Sony Reader. I just wish it were more intuitive, more book-like.

The above notwithstanding, I have actually gotten rather used to my Sony Reader, and like having it available, although I sometimes have to work a bit harder to ignore its shortcomings. And while I still am planning on finding ways to get decent non-DRMed content for it, if desperate enough (meaning I’ve read everything I wanted to that’s already on my Sony Reader), I may plunk down some funds to buy some new books at some point (but not without complaining about the high relative price). However, I certainly do not plan on using it as a music player. That’s what my iPod is for.

In conclusion, I give the Sony Reader a 4.5 out 10.0 on The Richter Scale.

As an addendum, even though the eInk paper does not use any real power when displaying a page, the Sony Reader still needs to be turned off during take off and landing on planes because it is an electronic device with an on/off switch. So that means I still need some sort of paper book or publication to read to keep myself distracted at those times. That’s an annoyance too, but one I don’t see a work around for.