In terms of functionality it doesn’t seem to go beyond the Sony- no touch screen, no colour, no wireless. In some ways this might put it a a disadvantage against the Kindle, but on its side it has the most iPod-esque design of any ereader yet, ADE compatibility, lightness (45% lighter than others apparently) and, from our perspective at least, availability in the UK.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I think ebook readers will only take off in a mass way once they are seriously desirable devices. These are, and hence form an important step. Activity around devices is hotting up. With the recent announcement that Amazon and the newly bought E-Ink corp are working hard at developing colour e-ink screens, the staturation point for ereading devices inches closer.

Repeated for the nth time: it’s not about an iPod moment, it’s about iPod moments plural. And I think this might just be one.

Yet in many ways, other than the blip that was the Kindle 2.0 launch, 2009 has conspicuously not been about the device. Think of Amazon’s recent announcement of an iPhone app; the meteoric rise of Stanza, unbowed by the Amazon play; the emergence of GoSpoken as reading software in there with the carriers and a range of smartphones. Think of the solid sales of the Nintendo DS reading package. This has been a year when buzzwords like mobile and twitter have taken on all comers and seen them left in the graveyard of 2008, not even worthy of a # tag.

New displays, new ways of reading. E-ink seems a remnant of a digital past as much as the future.

However I think we shouldn’t take our eyes off the reading device, and that this will still be a major, if not the only, focus of digital reading.

Why?

Because reading experiences on readers are very good and replicating that on other formats is extremely difficult. As the NYT pictures shows, this is a very healthy space.

There is a problem though. For reading devices to break out into the mainstream, to force their way back into the conversation, they have to become wildly desirably and also achieved a heightened simplicity. This might be sumamrised by saying people need to want them, and then need to be able to use them to a degree that has hitherto not been the case. I want / I can.

Two examples: Apple and Google. When Google first launched the general search engine strategy was to be an overall web portal, with search as one feature amongst a large and complex content menu. Google zoned into search and just search; their design was clean, focused, easy to use, without distraction and solely consumer centric in it’s layout and absence of extraneous content. The number of words on the homepage was, and as far as I know is, ruthlessly limited to avoid clutter and confusion. You can say Google’s growth was driven by any number of factors but only a fool would suggest this effortless interface wasn’t one of them.

Again, the iPod had a phenomenally intuitive control, especially given the bemusing buttons and rollers of it’s competitors (and I should know as I held out for some time, before caving in with a combination of resignation and glee). Characteristic of it’s manufacturer this no doubt has been an enormous boon to the device. Beyond that though the now iconic look from legendary Apple designer Jonathan Ive was what made us want one. The iPod wasn’t just useful, fun etc- it was jaw grindingly desirable.

Usability and covetability. Two principles for world domination.

What strikes me as being the interesting parallel with these two, aside from the the slightly obvious observations just outlined, is that both came from behind. They did not have first mover advantage. Instead they used these design concepts to leapfrog into pole. Indeed, it could be argued that precisely not coming first was an advantage in that it allowed the pair to fine tune their product and get these two crucial areas right.

Going back to the ereader then, I get the sense that we are on the cusp of when useability and covetability collide, uniting in a glorious burst of reading device nirvana. Ok maybe not quite, but once those user interfaces have been tweaked, and once someone like Ive gets there hands on a reading device, they will be back.

Don’t write off e-ink yet.

Something changed in 2008. For the better. Obviously not the global economy, no, rather I am talking about the publics attitude and awareness of ebooks. Anecdotally I have been amazed at the transformation of ebooks in people’s perceptions from soulless book killers to the saviour of holiday reading; from impossible, unworkable uber-geek niche, to mass-market Oprah promoted consumer phenomenon.

Of course not everyone has decided ebooks are great, but certainly there is far more discussion of and openness to them.  Reading devices too have broken through- in publishing they have been unhesitatingly embraced as a convenient solution by readers used to lugging around huge and cumbersome manuscripts.

Anyway without further ado, my highlights of 2008…

The Sony and Waterstone’s launch: Professionally the first 8 months of my year were dominated by the run up to the September launch of the Waterstone’s ebook store and the UK release of the Sony PRS-505. It was a long time coming but this event singlehandedly put a rocket up the e-backside of UK trade publishing and gave ebooks a huge momentum. Suddenly ebooks were in the papers, on TV and most importantly readily available.  Yes there were ebook stores and reading devices before this, but none had quite the scale and the all round package. This was the moment ebooks broke out and became mainstream.

The iPhone 3G and the Appstore: If ebooks went mainstream then the 3G launch of the iPhone and the Appstore went stellar-humungous-out-of-control mainstream. Millions of handsets, hundreds of millions of apps and that sweet, sweet interface transformed not just mobiles but the whole raison d’etre of hand held devices.  Suddenly we were all walking round with portable games consoles, reference libraries, music players, web browsers and yes, reading devices.  What can I say? I’m helplessly addicted to Reign of Swords.

We Tell Stories: In their partnership with Six to Start Penguin took a bold step in redefining the role of a publisher. So this might not be the kind of storytelling that booms in a downturn.  What the hell, it was great watching the ideas and narratives unfold, finally seeing the synergy between and old and new media storytelling I’d been looking for.  The work of Six to Start and the continued burgeoning of cross platform entertainment (or what Dan Hon might called a “story game”) has been a fantastic strand of 2008.

Anything else that should be up there?

James adds…

My three highlights of the year that was are: authonomy.com, thegoldennotebook.org, and Faber Finds… And, erm, our own programme of ebook special editions, which are significant, if not wildly commercial, explorations of the potential of the ebook composition of a text.

Authonomy.com showed us again, as Macmillan New Writing did the year before, and perhaps lulu.com and Create Space the year before that, that there is a large group of web users out there who are also authors trying and wanting to be published. This community holds good writing within it and the industry should pay attention.

The online reading of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook is, I think, the first really strong example of a networked book in action that we have seen. It works both as an academic exercise in distributed and interactive reading, and as an example of how open source software and a bit of hackery can facilitate a digital approach to publishing.

Finally, Faber Finds – and by extension, Bookkake – illustrates how POD and a bit of intelligent package design (and ruthless rights hunting) can enlarge your house’s list seemingly overnight! And that only a few copies sold can mean costs covered. Oh, and that the value of a book can be re-invested in that book if customers’ excitement in the book itself can somehow be married to a simple act of passing the buck to suppliers when it comes to the price point.

2008 is dead; long live 2009.

First of all I asked Cliff, a friend who runs the local pub-hotel, a keen reader, but no geek (he only discovered the iPod this year). Cliff ran his fingers over the Sony and declared, first of all, that he liked the look and feel of it. I showed him the controls and he had the knack of picking a book and moving backwards and forwards very quickly. Then I let him browse through the collection of works on the thing.

His eyes opened wide.

‘You get all this stuff?’

‘Yes. The free stuff is out of copyright which means that…’

‘You get all this stuff!’

God bless the public. They know nothing about copyright, do they? All Cliff saw was a vast collection of old books he hadn’t read in ages, a few he’d always meant to read, and the possibility of going on his cruise in February with a complete library stored in something that will fit into the side pocket of a briefcase. ‘Sold’ did not describe Cliff’s response to the Sony. He was absolutely in love with the thing and checking out its availability online in a flash. This I found deeply interesting because here was someone who is not naturally keen on electronica at all.

My next guinea pig was my daughter, Kate. She graduated from UCL with a first in English earlier this year and is an utter bookaholic. Again, she is not a natural for this thing. She likes writing in longhand, loves pen and paper, and actually buys CDs because she prefers the sound to the thin, compressed audio you get with iTunes.

Kate has done some work experience in publishing and is looking for a job as an editorial assistant somewhere (all vacancies to me at davidhewson.com please). So she has a couple of different perspectives on the thing – as a reader and someone who’s seen inside the publishing industry. The reader in her was impressed too. She found the screen and the type excellent, and the device very simple to use. Like everyone she was taken aback by the sheer volume of material it can hold. And she liked it as a piece of equipment too – it felt good to hold and didn’t scream ‘geek’.

Her work experience had given her some insight into handling manuscripts, though, and here the demands are a bit different. Like me, she would have liked some way to make notes or at least name bookmarks in a manuscript, or perhaps even edit text in some way. But that, I guess, is not what the Sony is for. This is an ebook, nothing more, nothing less. If you want email, web access, store browsing and a lot of fancy features you will have to wait for something else.

Will this dent the Sony’s sales? I doubt it somehow. This clever little thing hits most of the buttons it seeks to press as a simple, convenient and very powerful means of carrying your own library along with you. It was a real pleasure to use. The battery life is simply amazing. And I’m sure the next version will be even better – though this one will, I think, do good service for years.

One thing did become clear when I spoke to other people about ebooks though. They are seen as a supplement to the printed word, not a replacement for it. Both Cliff and Kate said very emphatically that they would not stop buying real books if they had a Sony. A simple electronic device, however clever, was no substitute for the physical medium of ink and paper. If something was really precious to you, then both felt that they would go to a book store and buy the ‘real thing’, if you can call it that.

As a mere author, you’ve no idea how reassuring I found that. Ebooks, it seems, are not what iTunes was to the CD market. They’re a new source of sales, not some digital newcomer that will sweep away everything that went before. Well, not for a while anyway.

I promised to take a look at Sony’s digital book on the road, since that is probably where many people would expect to use it. Imagine packing for your holiday and storing hundreds of books on a single little electronic device. True it is electronic, but no more fragile than a camera. And it would read beautifully on a beach.

It was not beach weather when I turned up at Kings Cross for my events in South Shields and Edinburgh where, very soon, I discovered what a different world we inhabit when things go digital. I happen to go under the fancy title of international director of the authors’ organisation International Thrillerwriters Inc. We have a growing band of members outside the US where ITW began, and some of the most enthusiastic are in South Africa. A band of them, under the editorship of Joanna Hitchen, have a short story collection coming out next year under the title Bad Company, published by Pan Macmillan South Africa. I promised to ask Lee Child, until recently an ITW member too, if he’d write the foreword (knowing Lee, one of the most generous bestsellers around, I didn’t think this would be difficult).

At Kings Cross I got the message that the collection was finished, ready to be read and enclosed as a pdf attachment. It downloaded onto my Nokia in under a minute using 3’s trusty mobile broadband and, before we were out of London, I’d transferred it to the Sony reader and was able to start reading the first typeset proof, finished in Johannesburg, edited in Cape Town, immediately. Excellent it is too. But could you imagine that a few years ago? Transferring an entire book across continents and then reading it, on what looks very like a real book, all while sitting on a train?

Bad Company is a professionally typeset book and, like most of those sold for the reader, looks pretty much on screen as it will on the page. Unfortunately you can’t expect that kind of publication quality with everything you can put on the reader. Some of the out of copyright classics Sony supply for free seem to be formatted more for computers than ebooks, in that they have extra line spaces between the paragraphs. This can be quite distracting. The reader’s screen is a touch short in any case, and wasted blank lines do get in the way of fluent reading.

I also took with me two versions of my current first draft of the ninth Nic Costa book, some 25,000 words, one in pdf format, one in rich text (the reader can handle both). The rtf worked fine and was as readable as an ebook, though if you switch between the three text sizes the reader does take a little while to process the rerendering of the text. The pdf was much more problematic. I use a Mac which will produce pdfs at the drop of a hat – as easily as printing. They look fine on my Mac, and on a PC too. But the Sony doesn’t like them at all, and they were dogged in particular by soft line breaks turning into hard ones, rendering the text unreadable. (Update: this can be fixed – see end of story). 

If, like me, you are an old book addict this is a bit of a problem. I use a wonderful piece of software called Voluminous which can track down out of copyright ebooks from sources such as Project Gutenberg and turn them into a readable format through a simple search interface. It would have been wonderful if I could have just hit ‘print to pdf’ and sent them to the Sony, but this wasn’t to be without faffing around with rtf and deciding fonts and font sizes.

Searching the web for a solution I discovered I wasn’t alone in noticing this apparent glitch in the Sony’s software. Is it a big deal? Probably not, since you can use rtf instead. Also it’s important to point out this is a machine aimed at normal human beings, not authors and publishers. It is simply a reader, not an editing console. You can’t write notes in the margin, search for text, or do anything to a manuscript beyond insert simple unidentified bookmarks. Readers probably won’t miss a thing, but as an author I would look for those facilities in a manuscript handling device – which this is only up to a point.

But these are professional quibbles which will not bother the mass market. The honest truth is the Sony behaved impeccably throughout my trip. The battery life is astonishing (partly because it doesn’t have fancy features such as wireless internet and a keyboard). The readability is excellent under a variety of conditions. I couldn’t help noticing the passenger in the next seat sneaking a look at it on the way north. And that brings me to the next and final article in this brief series. Let’s show Sony’s invention to a few potential everyday customers and see what they think.

But first an event at Edinburgh’s beautiful Central Library – where I might just show it off out of interest too.

*Thanks to the comment below I am happy to retract my statement that Mac pdfs don’t work on the Sony. It’s all a question of formatting and getting the page size right. Which isn’t easy by the way – some help for Mac users from Sony would be appreciated.

Back in the mists of time when I wrote about technology for the Sunday Times I once asked Bill Gates about ebooks. It was at a press event in a house in Gramercy Park New York, circa 1995 when the Microsofties were trying to prove to the world that they were family-friendly by launching a bunch of products, some successful, some disastrous, aimed at the home, not the office.

Mr Gates (who had allegedly somewhat ruined the atmosphere by referring to children in one interview as ‘basic subsets of the family entity’) was, for once, up for any question I could think of. So I wondered if he thought we would all be abandoning paper to read books and newspapers on screen before long, fully expecting a technophiliac answer predicting the death of print everywhere.

‘No,’ he said, confounding all expectations. ‘We don’t have the technology and we don’t have the need, not for a long time.’

Is thirteen years long enough? On my desk now is Sony’s newly-released PRS-505 ‘portable reader system’, available at Waterstones and a variety of other outfits – if you can find one in stock – for £199. These things have been thrust at journalist, publishers and lucky readers for a little while. But Sony very kindly thought they would shove one at an author too to see what one of us thinks, and I am the lucky scribe.

I’ll be taking it on the road for some promotional events up north this week, and showing it around to people I know to get their opinions too. So look for a couple more posts when I am more familiar with the beast. But first impressions count – as do first prejudices.

To be honest I’ve always felt a little sympathy with Mr Gates’ initial view. I spent a lot of my time staring at computer screens. All of my books are written using a very nifty piece of software specially aimed at authors, Scrivener. Even so I will print out drafts of the manuscript repeatedly and read them with a pen in hand because, let’s say it out loud, reading on screen just isn’t the same.

At least not on a conventional flat screen, which the Sony very much does not have. I won’t bore you with the technology but it is nothing like the flat screen in your TV or computer monitor. This is a kind of electronic ink. A tedious fact in itself were it not for two things: it actually looks very good indeed, sharp and very much like real text. And it has no backlight so the Sony uses no power whatsoever when you are simply reading a page – only when you ‘turn’ to a new one.

How close to paper is it? Very close, particularly in bright daylight (when most electronic screens are utterly readable). The background isn’t as white a you’d expect, and you can’t see much in dark situations where a laptop would be very readable. But it’s a lot better than I expected, and I was quite happy flicking through books very quickly with it indeed.

So there’s the first lesson I learned about the Sony. You need to see it to believe it. Prejudices, for or again, really don’t count for much because this is quite unlike anything else you’ve ever encountered before.

Here’s the second big surprise: the size and feel of the thing. It’s tiny, little bigger than a paperback book, beautifully made, with a sturdy and expensive-looking satin metal shell encased in a cover that feels very like brown leather (which it isn’t). I’ve seen other book readers and they all, let’s be frank, look like calculators that have spent too long in McDonalds. The Sony isn’t plasticky, doesn’t shout ‘geek’ and feels very, very nice in the hand. It’s also, perhaps deliberately, under-featured compared to something like Amazon’s Kindle (which isn’t available in the UK and won’t be for some time). The Kindle has a keyboard, wireless internet and a lot of possibilities.

The PRS-505 is pretty much an ebook reader plain and simple. You can load mp3 files on it (using an external memory card since the built-in memory is aimed at book storage, not music). You can even load your favourite photos and look at them in black and white, though quite why I don’t know. But this is about reading books really, and I rather like that idea. You don’t get distracted by thinking, ‘Let’s just check the email’. It’s also dead easy to use – with buttons for moving forward and backwards in a book, a bookmark button that ‘turns’ the corner of the page to store a location, and some other buttons on the side that let you browse your library (and, a little tip, allow you to go to a page number if you type them in).

The thing comes with a hundred free out of copyright classics such as Moby Dick, Pride and Prejudice, and Dracula. You buy ebooks online from the Waterstones site, download them to your computer, then transfer them to the reader via a simple USB cable. There’s special software to automate this on Windows, though you have to do it manually if you’re a Mac user like me – which isn’t hard. You can also load pdf and Word files on it too.

So first impressions are good, better, to be honest, than I expected. I shall be climbing on board the train to Newcastle with more than a hundred books on this thing, including one of my own, and the first 25,000 words of the book I’m writing now (which you lot won’t see till 2010). Supposedly I can turn 6,800 pages before needing a recharge which ought to set me up for a four-day trip I’d hope.

Next week some time I’ll tell you what it feels like after a couple of days.

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.

As I’m sure all of those working in the digital publishing departments of trade publishing houses will agree, it’s nice finally to have a major high street bookselling brand pitch itself into the ebook ring so wholeheartedly – and the Sony device is the most compelling (and competitively priced) there is of the dedicated devices so far available here in the UK. I must say it did make my heart leap just a little bit to see huge POS displays promoting the Sony Reader and the associated ebook catalogue from Waterstones in the Tottenham Court Road and Piccadilly branches, and it was fun to go in and do some underground detective work to discover that the Waterstones staff seemed quite clued up about it all.

There has certainly been an uplift on direct sales of ebooks from our own web site over the weekend, although this may well have something to do with our our promotion of eight non-drm’d SF books which started last week. It is also bringing out terrible trainspotting tendencies in me as I find myself wanting to look at our web-based sales analysis tool on a regular basis…

As for the press and publicity; well, the media seems to have gone mad for it, don’t they? Not always in a positive way, but based on the premise that all publicity is good publicity, great timing, Sony and Waterstones! Launching on the back of silly season and given the choice of a piece about a ‘potential revolution in reading’ or another funny animal story, Sony seems to have won every time. However, as Diane Shipley has written on the Picador blog here, it would be nice to see a little more excitement in the media, a little less of the wrinkled noses.

Of course, I still believe the future of books on screen is not going to be dominated by a single, dedicated reading device. I don’t really believe the Sony reader is the killer device or even a killer device, but it’s certainly making an impact on the media and consumer imaginations. And I am becoming quite fond of mine. Reading will no doubt continue to take place across a variety of mediums dependent on the reader’s personal lifestyle, preferred existing gadget(s) and tendency towards paper sniffing – or not.

And now for a little grumble: it would be really, really be nice if you could actually search the Waterstones ebook site by author / title / ISBN / keyword rather than having to browse the category or bestseller pages. Harrumph.