iRex announced the new iLiad. It’s big, (10.2″ big), shiny, comes with a touch screen and costs what, even in times of boom and plenty, would be considered alot: $849 with wifi (not 3G). So in the UK probably £849. Without wireless. Still, designed with the business user in mind it looks good and might work.

Then Sony announced their new reader, the PRS 700. And, praise be, it comes with a touch screen, looks shiny and new, keeps the cool leather case; alas, shame be upon it, there is no wireless connectivity. Price point = $399, you do the maths for the UK version.

If all this excitement wasn’t enough leaked pictures started appearing of a new, shiny, sexier(ish) Kindle, making a perfect storm of new ereaders that between them mark round 2.0 in the long hard road to flawlessly desirable ereaderdom, even if we don’t know whether the Kindle pictures are real or not. For fun we can assume they are.

The irony is of course that every economic chart currently resembles a cliff or at least the bad side of a relativelty steep mountain. There has been much talk of how publishing might be “recession proof“; of how sales are up due to Super Thursday and the impending Frankfurt Bookfair will be as big, glitzy and money spendingly awesome as ever. To my mind such talk sounds a bit like the commercial equivalent of waving a big red flag at a big angry bull, but no matter. Book publishing has always survived previous recessions roughly in tact so it’s fair to assume the same will happen this time round. We can assume that demand for books will not be as elastic as for Ferraris and second homes in Hampshire.

All of which might suggest that there is great potential for ebooks at this juncture, as there is a flexibility inherent in the format that allows for greater responsiveness to market conditions and experimentation in commercial models. All of which is fine, but won’t really matter if nobody buys any ereaders, the principle consumption vehicle for ebooks. Articles on consumer spending are a plethora of dark clouds and the ereaders, as a reasonably large discretionary spend on a unique piece of functionality, are caught up in the high street maelstrom. All three of the ereaders announced may fall into a category of goods savaged as the credit crunch carries on crunching with the result that ebook forecasts have to be revised for 09. Demand is, one would think, fairly elastic for an iRex iLiad.

It comes at a sensitive time for digital publishing as the industry finds a toehold in reader’s imaginations and retailer websites. This is an area of publishing that has never experienced a recession and divining what impact it might have is like guessing which bank will fail next- a matter of luck as much as judgement. Charlie Stross has written that no one knows what a web 2.0 recession looks like. Not a 20th century one seems a safe answer, if such an answer can be said to exist. Credit to the manufacturers they have all, by the looks of it, upped the stakes in terms of the quality and functionality of the next gen readers. We have to respond in kind by making sure that our products are available and of high quality- books that are worth investing in, worth skipping a restaurant and staying in for and easy enough for anyone to do so. Ebooks have to be as good as their print cousins- and better.

The long winded message of this article can be summarised fairly easily: to ensure that the just announced next gen of ereaders doesn’t fail, manufacturers will have to seriously consider cutting price points in reaction to the (real and anticipated) collapse of consumer demand as a result of the crunch. While ebooks will be robust enough without it, they could really start kicking ass if we get a bit creative.

Apologies to anyone immeasurably bored of hearing the words “credit crunch” and “economic crisis”. You are not alone.

Upon finishing the tome, under the iron skies of London alas, I went to www.fictionwise.com to get me an eBook. The iLiad is primarily designed to read Mobipocket files and although it can take pdfs the reading quality is generally poor. So the format was pretty much pre-determined. As for the title I chose William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition seeing as a) I have wanted to read it for a while, and b) Gibson is suitably cutting edge and digitally minded to give a sense of aptness to the experience of reading him on a cutting edge eBook device. Only the US edition was available, cutting the books UK publisher Penguin out of the deal entirely, and was reasonably priced at $14. After going through the standard internet check out, as easy on fictionwise as amazon, you then have to navigate the dreaded Mobipocket DRM before you can read the book you have bought, which initially comes in the form of an email link to a secure page on fictionwise from which the title can be downloaded. Mobipocket DRM basically means that you can download the eBook to four Mobipocket registered devices (like the iLiad or the Mobipocket reading software) which each feature a unique ID for you to input on fictionwise or where ever you happen to buy the eBook. Following the instructions was far more simple and painless than I had feared and before long the eBook was comfortably ensconced on the iLiad.

Andrew Marr’s article on the iLiad gets it broadly right. The right size and the right weight, the iLiad is an immediately comfortable object to hold, its dimensions and weight equivalent to a handsome trade paperback or slim hardback. What is immediately impressive is the E-Ink display: forgetting about colour and functionality for a moment and focusing on pure reading experience it really is fantastic, indistinguishable from print type in its ease and flexibility to read. From almost any angle and in any brightness the display remains consistent and suffers no more environmental distortions than would a print book. Pretty soon you forget it’s an electronic page and get lost in the words.

Marr is right in saying that the iLiad’s tactile elements, like the flickable side bar used to “turn” pages, are nice touches that add some warmth and engagement to the reading experience. I even found myself becoming attached to the iLiad in a way you wouldn’t immediately expect and isn’t replicated in most technology.

There are some downsides. Reading a print book you don’t wait for the thing to charge up. It’s quite annoying when you are in a queue and fancy just reading a couple of pages to pass the time, as by the time your book’s loaded your at the front. Ok, loading time is probably a minute maximum from turning it on to reading but still, its something you notice. You also wouldn’t expect your print book to run out of batteries mid read. This is doubly annoying as the iLiad’s screen just freezes, turning it on and off does nothing and so you begin to think “Have I just broken £400 worth of iLiad? Crap….” Luckily it just needs to be plugged in, then turned on and off, but still. It may be that the system just crashed and it wasn’t a lack of batteries, hard to say, but it doesn’t effect the overall negative hanging over the iLiad. One other thing worth mentioning was also highlighted by Marr: the fact that after each page turn you have a one or two second delay before the following page materializes. After a while your mental and scanning flow re-adjust and you pretty much anticipate the momentary pause, even if the slight weirdness of it never quite leaves. While you would read the iLiad on the beach, the tube, in parks, you probably wouldn’t want to try the Margaret Atwood test and read it in your bath.

My overall experience though was thoroughly good, as was the novel, which suffered no harm at all in the transition to an electronic medium. One’s sense of a novel undergoes some tweaking as you no longer have the physical pages, which indicate position in a story arc, to hand but soon you get used to this and it almost forces you to focus more deeply on the text and the plot (plus bar on the display indicates your position). Despite acting as an electronic tablet the iLiad doesn’t have the range of functionality (or the price tag) to truly take off. Still, it’s a nice device that offers an interesting and very pleasurable read.

So next time I am on a beach…expect pictures.