The Richter Scale^®

Thursday, January 5th - way too early in the morning to be up in Vegas. It’s the opening keynote of CES, featuring Sir Howard Stringer, chairman and CEO of Sony. Mostly it’s been a lot of flash and pitching of Sony products.

But among the highlights (in addition to an absolutely hilarious appearance by Tom Hanks) was the introduction of Dan Brown, celebrated author of The Da Vinci Code, whom Sir Howard brought in to discuss the new Sony Reader.

The Sony Reader is an electronic device similar in size to an oversized paperback (but thinner), featuring electronic paper, a capacity to store nearly a hundred books internally, and hundreds more on Memory Stick or SD media. All pages are black and white, and the device can also be used to grab blogs, web pages, and images and store those in the Sony Reader (or on the portable media). The Sony Reader has a projected price in the $299 to $399 range, and is expected to ship at the end of March 2006. Sony plans on making thousands of books available via the Sony CONNECT service. The battery life on the Sony Reader is projected to allow for 7500 page changes (no power is used by electronic paper when being displayed, only during the transitions).

Dan Brown lauded the Sony Reader as a great tool for education, for travelers, and for researchers such as himself. He gave as an example his ability to use the Sony Reader to take hundreds of books of reference materials with him on a research trip, in a very small package, and then being able to download any additional books he might have still needed but forgot to “pack” (instead of trying to find a bookstore in some foreign country which carries the English language version of the book he wants). However, I should point out that the sorts of research books Dan Brown wants are unlikely to be available in an electronic format any time soon.

Brown also discussed the boon that a device like the Sony Reader would be a boon to education, as instead of having to carry bags of books, at a high per pupil cost, students could just carry an electronic book reader with all the content they need. That would certainly be nice, but I think pricing of e-book content will need to reflect the much reduced distribution and duplication cost - and presently, it’s not, if you look at electronic books available from Amazon (or digital music from the music download services in contrast to physical media contribution).

One area which I think will be a major new market for e-book content will be the publication of works by lesser known authors. We already see some of that now with blogs on the Internet, where anyone who wants to write can self publish. That’s one end of the spectrum, while authors like Dan Brown with huge marketing budgets behind them are at the other end of the spectrum. And in the middle are authors with real publishers, but small budgets. They will be the ones to truly benefit here.

Brown did say that he still feels that nothing will quite replace the feel of a book in his hands, being able to turn pages, and even the smell of a leather binding, reading in his den. But outside the den, or perhaps the home, readers like Sony Reader have the edge.

I agree, and I’m therefgore adding the Sony Reader to my gift wishlist.

But I wonder if the flight attendants will let me read from the Sony Reader during takeoff and landing. Will Sony lobby the TSA to get it listed as a non-electronic device, or will I only be able to read the current page, and not flip it to the next one during the “no electronic devices” flight segments?

UPDATED: 01/05/2006 - 19:41 AST

Yesterday, Tuesday, January 3rd was effectively Day 0 of the Consumer Electronics Show here in Las Vegas. It’s the day before the conferences start, and two days before the exhibit floors officially open.

My first CES-related task of the day was an overview of the consumer electronics industry for 2006, presented by Sean Wargo, director of industry analysis for the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA). The CEA runs the CES show. That was at 3pm, giving me ample time to go shopping for a number of items I needed as well as finalize my press registration.

My shopping task was to find a nice suit to replace my old tuxedo (losing 20% of your body weight as I have affects how old clothes fit, I’ve discovered) for formal functions. I wanted something with a “mandarin collar”. No luck finding that, but I did stumble across what I thought would be my dream mini-notebook (at least for now) - small, portable, and pretty powerful - with a great battery life.

I found this marvel at the Sony Style store at Caesar’s Forum Shops - it’s the TX series notebook. The model I wanted, the TX-690, which features 1.5GB of RAM and a cool blue metal finish, was not in stock (and had not been available on-line last week either, so I held off buying what they had in stock - the TX-670. While searching every store at the Forum Shops from Armani to Banana Republic for my suit, I get a call saying that a small shipments of the 690s arrived. I hightailed it back to the Sony store and bought it along with an extra battery and docking station.

To make a long story shorter, I’ve spent the last day trying to get the machine set up the way I want. Somewhere along the way, the 90 day trial version of Norton Internet Security choked, giving me a blue screen of death after I tried to uninstall it, so I had to waste hours of work doing a complete recovery. I figure I’m about 12 hours into getting the system set up properly now, and expect to spend at least another two putting my data from my other notebook on it. Sigh. Meanwhile, all the great blog entries and writing I had planned to have done by now have not materialized.

The battery life on the TX-690 is remarkable. I had it running pretty much non-stop from 9am until 3:30pm today on just the small battery. And now that it’s close to properly set-up I can say I am happy with my extravagant purchase.

More later. Off to the Sony press conference. And Panasonic apparently just announced that Comcast has selected them to provide next generation set-top boxes, much to the surprise of the person I just overheard hollering this into his cell phone here in the convention center.

The Consumer Electronics Show starts this week here in Las Vegas, and I
will be providing occasional coverage from the show floor during the
week.

Pictured below is the scene at Las Vegas’ McCarron airport.

Many people welcome the new year with so-called New Year's Resolutions. Many of the same people break those resolutions before the first day of the new year is over. That makes New Year's resolutions seem rather empty except for the most diligent and faithful resolution makers.

Knowing that I am one of the many who frequently (in the past) did not have the discipline to follow through on resolutions, I instead opt for a different approach wherein I attempt to do two things. First, I reflect on all that went well or went poorly in the year gone by, and second, I try to figure out what the year in advance might look like in a general sense and see what I might be able to do to nudge things in a positive direction.

The real painful part of this process is the reflection on the past year, as it frequently dredges up some real bonehead things I did or was involved in. In past years this has included things like scraping up my truck on a fence due to trying to stop in slippery mud, wearing shoes with no traction on freshly waxed floors, the occasional verbal faux pas in front of a friend or business associate, being inconsistent with my children, ruining the Hollandaise sauce I was making from scratch, and countless other things which may mostly seem minor to someone else, but are items that I have lost sleep over or agonized about.

I don’t know about you, but I have kept hoping that as I get older, I get wiser. And in some respects, that has held true with respect to certain stupid things I have done once, learned from, and not repeated. But man’s ability to do stupid things or things one regrets knows no bounds, regardless of age. And one can only hope one recognizes when one has done something stupid, and that the event of stupidity does not hurt anyone else.

Fortunately, the pain of stupidity is usually balanced or outweighed by the good things that have happened and that I have done (at least in my estimation). And I must say, although I would not call it a resolution, I strive to do more good things than stupid things each year.

So, to those whom I have inadvertently insulted, dismayed, or otherwise offended during 2005, my heartfelt apologies.

To those whom I have been able to help in one way or another, it was my pleasure. Truly.

So here’s to 2006 - may it be as good as, or better than 2005!