A very dear Reader

tauringhuang.

Posted by: Economist.com | LONDON
Categories: Books Technology
SONY launched its Reader in Britain last week. Selling in Waterstone's bookshops for £199 ($351), it is being touted as the first e-book reader to be widely available in this country. Of its main competitors, Irex's iLiad is being sold in a few Borders stores; Amazon’s Kindle should be on sale later in the year.

Like its rivals (and like a normal book), the Reader is not backlit, which means its screen can be read in direct sunlight but not in the dark. It can hold 160 books, and you get 6,800 page turns from the battery life—enough to read "War and Peace" five times over, should you be so inclined.

Gulliver’s interest is piqued because business travellers would appear to be an obvious customer group. The Reader weighs only slightly more than a normal paperback, so someone who flies frequently would benefit from both the weight saving and the convenience of this portable library.

It is already possible to read books on palm-top devices and mobile phones, but that sounds like an eye-watering experience unappealing for anything other than the briefest of reading stints. But what about this new generation of pseudo-books?

Gulliver is generally with the Luddites on this one. The Economist wrote about e-books in 2000 and explained a drawback that has not lost its potency:
...bookish people have an emotional relationship with the titles on their shelves. They regard crisp paper between cardboard covers as more than a content-delivery device.Nick Hornby, a British novelist, blogged on the topic for Penguin much more recently. He highlighted some other reasons why e-book readers may not storm the market: "Apple is uninterested in designing an e-book reader, which means that they don’t look very cool" and, more pertinently, they are entering a market that is diminishing as (surveys show) people are reading less.

So Gulliver won't be rushing to buy a Sony Reader—or, naturally, to spend £390 on an iLiad—but would love to hear from those in the opposite camp. Does the Sony Reader cut it? Is the Kindle the way forward? Are e-book readers only viable if they allow users to read other items, such as  newspapers, and do bookish things, such as write notes in the margin? Stereotypical book-readers are late adapters of technology: what should they do in this instance?