Happy reader
If you spend as many hours in front of your machine as I do, you are very likely to be excited about E-Ink. My infatuation with E-Ink started the moment I heard about their idea few year s ago and I have been impatiently waiting to see them be incorporated into products I can use.
My excitement about the technology is not only because of the long impressive list of advantages e-ink displays will have over conventional ones; readability (especially in sunlight), extremely low power consumption, lighter and thinner displays, etc.
The technology in and of itself is infinitely cool. It is really a paradigm shift in the way we look at displays. While others are busy figuring better and cheaper ways to emit light, filter light, reflect light, etc. E-Ink went back to the paper and said, since this worked so well for thousands of years, maybe we can find a way to move the ink around! A simple concept (although the technical details are not), yet very powerful.
So few days ago, I was happy to find out that my patient wait could be over. I ran across the Sony Reader! Although the Japanese equivalent was released more than a year ago, it took them that long to release one in the US. Had I heard the news earlier, I would have camped at Sony Style’s door steps in PS3-style just to be the first to get my hands on one. Lucky for me (and my wife) I didn’t.
The very next day, I visited the Sony Style shop in downtown San Francisco with Azhar, marveled over it loudly, and then reminded my wife of my near-coming birthday. It worked and we left with one.
My impressions of it are very positive so far. In Sony style of course, the reader was pre-charged, which meant that I was able to start using it the moment I took it out of the box. And although my expectations were pretty high, I was pretty impressed with the way the display worked.
The reader comes with windows software that I couldn’t run since all my machines run Linux. Googling around, I found that someone had already reverse engineered the reader’s USB protocol and posted a python app that makes it possible to install and modify books and other media installed on the reader.
I am currently reading Marvin Minsky’s The Emotion Machine, so I decided that it would be the first book I install since it will be easy for me to compare the reading experience. The first thing that struck me after I installed the book, is how much lighter my back pack will become just because I don’t have to haul that big book (and it’s not the only one) around with me anymore.
The reading experience is great so far. Moving between pages is slow (1-2 seconds per page flip), and you don’t have enough control over font size
, but those are minor inconveniences really compared to the advantages. Besides, you develop ways to deal with them. For example, now my mind automatically flips the page a couple of seconds before I reach the end of the page, and I use open office to resize small-font PDFs and re-print them on A5 size PDF files.
Next came the big test, and I had to take it outside. Luckily, Azhar and I took a stroll on Doloris Park and we ended up sitting on the grass there. The screen couldn’t have been more beautiful. So clear and comfortable to read that I clearly was able to read faster that I could on my LCD screen in a dimly lit room.
That is actually the other thing that I noticed. It was clear to me how less stress my eyes felt while reading from the reader than from my laptop’s LCD. After my cataract operations, I feel strain faster and more intensely after reading for a while, and I can tell you that the difference is clear.
I am very happy with my purchase, and after I have used it for a couple of days, I am happy to say that I would have still made the same decision.