In my other job I recently got to assess three e-book readers. These are electronic devices that:

•    can display ‘pages’ of an electronic book (in various formats);
•    use technology called ‘e-ink‘  which is very energy efficient (prolonging device battery life between charges) and has a contrast similar to printed text;
•    can sometimes do other things such as play audio files or allow note-taking/marking of electronic texts.

The three devices were:
•    The Sony Reader
•    The Cybook
•    The Iliad

[L to R: the Cybook, Sony and Iliad. As with all images in this post - click to enlarge.]

Current thinking amongst librarians and educationalists

On LIS-Link recently a librarian asked “is there any work being done in the sector on using them as learning tools in libraries? putting whole course reading on them etc?” The general response was that there is not much research being done (except in individual institutions), because the technology is relatively new. There has been research on e-books (i.e. text usually read over the Internet from a computer screen), but not much on the handheld devices. One respondent said:

“I have been suggesting for some time – like your academic – that there is a role for them and would like to see Sony or iRex take part in an experiment with one university. The main problems, however, centre on the lack of academic texts available for the e-book readers and in devising an appropriate and affordable licensing model for those that are, such that they could be held on individual student’s readers for an academic year.” [Ref]

There are exceptions – there is a very early report of attempts to use e-book readers in Australian public libraries from as far back as 2001. Barriers were identified, and it would be interesting to question how many of the barriers are now removed by the current generation of e-book readers?

One piece of library research which has got some publicity is:

“Penn State University Libraries and the English Department begin a year-long pilot project with student groups using the Sony Reader Digital Book […]. Sony donated 100 of the devices to the Libraries for the project that will test the utility of e-books in a higher education environment. The study will explore the potential of the Sony Readers in a variety of settings, including the Libraries’ leisure reading program, undergraduate and graduate classrooms, academic research projects, and as a service for people with disabilities.” [Ref]

This will be interesting to follow, but not all comment is enthusiastic – Joe Wikert (in his ‘Publishing 2020′ blog) warns that the idea of loaning e-book readers from libraries is flawed, since demand will outstrip availability, and inevitable loss or damage will be costly.

Uses?

So what are some of the potential uses? Here is a current US example of one way libraries might use e-book readers:

“According to Greg Raschke, associate director of collections and scholarly communication at the [North Carolina State University] library, the Learning Commons will have two Sony Readers and six Amazon Kindles ready to check out for a week at a time. Students looking to check out the e-book readers can visit the reference desk in the East Wing, where they can tell the reference librarians which books they want to download onto the device. Books that have already been downloaded will stay on the device, where students can access them. [...]

“Essentially, students can sort of build their own popular collection,” Raschke said. “Students have been asking us for a while to build up our popular collection.”

The library will also purchase subscriptions to the nation’s major newspapers, available wirelessly with the Kindle. Although the devices will come with extra perks like these, Raschke said he figures they will mostly be used for leisure reading.

And Schrag said that’s a trend that is likely to continue even among the broader audience for e-book readers like the Kindle or Reader. It will be a while, he said, before devices like the Kindle could be used in areas like the college classroom, which means students won’t see a decrease in textbook costs from e-book readers.”
‘Library to offer new reading options’ Tuesday, April 22, 2008.

So possibilities are:

• Book collections for students, with devices added to loan stock. For example, it would be ideal for English literature students – every work of Shakespeare, Austen, Byron, Dickens etc could be added for free via sources like Project Gutenberg. (Note – if in loan stock, one tip could be to make the first document on the reader a simple bi-lingual guide to ‘How to use it’, perhaps with a summary of the contents of the e-book reader.).
• Following that pattern, guides and documents relevant to the institution could be included (e.g. guides to subject resources? Style guides? How to avoid plagiarism?).
• Making audio material available (e.g. the audio version of books) – some e-book readers support this feature. An LRC could increase the accessibility of texts for their users. (Note, there is concern about the availability of useful student texts as e-books).  The devices could also hold music, Welsh lessons, spoken guides (e.g. a self-guided tour), podcasts etc.
• Teaching materials: course readings and lecturer’s notes and materials on there, so that they have all the material to support a course? (Would the device then be borrowed from the library; or given to the student, funded through course fees?)
• Notes: the Iliad allows annotation and note-taking.
• Staff tool: for taking notes; for catching up on reports (especially on the move); large documents that use lots of paper when printed could be loaded onto it to save paper e.g. HILT (Handbook for Information Literacy Teaching).
• Image: a chance for libraries to appear cutting edge, and impress students. Also an opportunity to promote our online e-books?
• Improve accessibility: offering audio books has already been mentioned; however most devices also allow font and size to be changed, making some books easier to read.

Individual readers

Each reader has different features (and the three I tested do not represent the only models out there). I will briefly cover the first impressions of each device.

However there are a few similarities:

• All screens have a refresh rate of a turning page – so they are slower than we may be used to on other modern media devices.
• All have grey background screens, not white, and are monochrome.
• All can display images, in greyscale.
• One criticism is that e-book readers could be replaced by other multimedia devices (iPods, Sony PSP etc) and small laptops. This is a valid point, though would the battery life off other devices be comparable?
• They all come with only printed quickstart guides. Full manuals usually needed to be downloaded then put onto the devices. They should have been on the devices already.
• None of the devices make it easy for a librarian to replace the internal battery if ever there are battery problems. No battery lasts forever, so there is no excuse not to make it easy for the user.

For all the following tests a number of files were created or used to assess the functions and usability of the e-book readers:

• A guide to searching the Internet
• A guide to legal literature
• ‘Free Radical‘ science-fiction novel
• Shakespeare’s ‘Shall I compare Thee To a Summer’s Day?’ sonnet
• Classic texts: Aesop’s Fables, the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Emma by Jane Austen, Bhagavad Gita
• Some Times Higher stories saved as PDFs
• Handbook for Information Literacy Teaching
• Some academic e-journal articles
• The Guardian Style Guide
• Some PPT presentations converted to PDFs in the excellent free OpenOffice – which displayed nice and clearly on the devices.
• [Images] Second Life screenshots
• [Audio] Some JISC Podcasts

Now I will give the good, the bad, and the other comments on the individual machines. Note that this is all just my personal opinions.

Sony Reader

The device most people seem to be interested in, thanks to the displays in every Waterstone’s bookshop. However Sony’s advertising based on stereotypes may annoy some librarians!

Cost: c. £200
Formats: Quite flexible. Text: PDF, Word files, .rtf and .txt files. Images: .jpg, .gif, .png, .pdf formats. Audio: mp3 or AAC.
Comes with: Quick start guide, software.
Battery life? Says one battery charge may last 6,800 page turns (reading War and Peace five times on one charge)

The good:

• Small, neat device. The small size makes it attractive.
• Charges over USB.
• The bookmark feature (just pressing a button which ‘folds’ down the corner of a page) is great for marking pages you want to return to in a document.
• The zoom works well, even on PDFs. There are 3 levels of zoom, fitting text to the screen.
• Navigation is easy. You just press ‘menu’, then use the rocker, or press a number (1-0) as a quick shortcut – they appear next to the relevant options.
• If you have lots of books on there, you can navigate by title, author, or date.
• Comes with a non-leather protective case (i.e. suitable for vegetarians).

The bad:

• Unlike the Iliad and Cybook, this requires you to install software. Sony has a bad reputation for invasive DRM, so many people may be reluctant to install any software related to Sony. There is no reason why the Sony Reader couldn’t have been designed just as a straightforward mass-storage device, as is the norm.
• When last checked, the Sony sites  didn’t seem to offer support for the Reader. E.g. this site; and this one is just a sales site.
• The alphabetical list by author uses first name e.g. J for Jane Austen.
• Compatibility problem – when connected to one PC, the device just kept connecting and disconnecting every few seconds, so no files could be transferred to or from it. Eventually I tried another USB port (rather than the extension cable) and it was okay. Unfortunately that PC is old so all USB ports are at the back of the PC on the floor under the desk and are inconvenient to get to, hence using a USB extension. All other USB devices work via the extension – MP3 players, digital cameras, even an external HDD work fine, but it is a problem for the Sony reader.
• Some MP3s and .docs just didn’t show up as available on the device, for no obvious reason. Others put on at the same time did.
• It is slightly confusing that the device has a rocker for navigating menus, but it doesn’t work in books – you have to switch to another one, even though both have left and right options.
• The device lists books and the author. However documents and PDFs you load on will usually have your own name as the author if you created it on your own machine – even if you were just changing the format of a document and are NOT the author. There seems to be no way to disable this – whereas the device should really just leave that field blank where the author is not known, rather than pulling an erroneous name from the document. An LRC assistant maintaining the device might not want their name to appear next to every file!

The Iliad

Strangely, it doesn’t come with Homer’s Iliad pre-loaded. I had been expecting to relive my poor attempts to translate it from the Greek as an undergraduate.

Cost: c. £443
Formats: XHTML and PDF. Strange omission of plain text; RTF would have been nice too. Does not work with audio files out of the box. I used the free Open Office to create PDFs, and the process of converting documents from other formats was simple enough.
Battery life? Says 3hrs to charge it but not how long it lasts. Seemed to last c. 10 hours when used for heavy note-taking. Just using it as a reader may extend the life.
Size: 155 x 216 mm; 16mm deep. 122x163mm display (but some space taken up with icons, so not all is for reading a book). 768 x 1024 pixels, 16 shades of grey.

The good:

• Note taking with the stylus is a good feature. I easily created a new template for minutes: with date, meeting, attendees headings etc. The devices is flexible in that way.
• Some students like to underline in books and write notes in them, to the chagrin of librarians. However with this device you can do that – and the notes can be erased afterwards. Best of both worlds.
• Large and good quality screen. (NB Size of screen and device could also be a negative in some cases, since it is larger and bulkier than the other devices.)
• The device is nice to use – not too many buttons, solid feel, good page-turning rocker.

The bad:

• The most expensive of the three e-book readers by quite a margin.
• It is not intuitive to resize text – if text is small you have to zoom in and scroll around the page using the stylus; whereas the other devices refit the text to the screen. If you use the Iliad the best option is to get the text size right when creating a PDF. (Tip – includes 1.5 line spacing, and set the font at least 16).
• The buttons are at the bottom instead of the top, so are sometimes pressed by a palm accidentally while writing with the stylus.
• The documentation says you have to create an online account in order to get software upgrades, manual etc. As someone who hates being forced to go to the trouble of registering devices, this was an annoyance.
• When you save notes the default format is 2008-10-07 (for 7 Oct – not 10 July, as would appear to UK user). There is no setting to change it to your own preference e.g. the UK standard 7-10-2008
• The device is slow to start – on one test the time from power on to reading a book was c.60 seconds.
• Some setting changes require the stylus – and if you set a Pin you can ONLY enter it with the stylus. So if the stylus was lost the device could not be used fully until it was replaced, a potential problem if loaning devices out (it is c. £15 for a replacement).
• The internal clock was incorrect – and the device has no way of changing the time, only of changing the time-zone/hour. So I couldn’t correct the fact that the minutes were wrong unless I created an iRex account and connect the device to their website. This is a big oversight, it would have been easy to include a time change feature in the setting.
• Navigation is simple, but if there were hundreds of books and documents on the device (which is not inconceivable, given the device’s function), it could be very slow flicking between screens to find the one you want.
• First impressions when I tried connecting it to my PC via USB were very off-putting. The device gave various error messages and was not visible to Windows XP as a device, even after various reboots. All other USB devices worked with no problem. I then tried it on two different laptops, and the same thing happened – just messages saying “A problem occurred during hardware installation”. However before I gave up I tried various websites and fora and eventually found the answer. It turns out you have to press the second button down (which is only labelled with a few cryptic lines) to go into ‘Device Manager mode’. This basic ‘tip’ should have been on a note in box, not something a used had to find by searching support fora.
• There were no instructions for transferring files to the Iliad, even in the main User Manual downloaded. Luckily you can just drag a PDF into a folder e.g. news or books; the device will move it to a subfolder and create an xml file once you disconnect it.

The indifferent:

• No protective case by default – so screen at risk?
• When you put documents on they are sorted alphabetically by the device, but you can change this to sort by different criteria. You can also search for words and phrases using the stylus and an on-screen keyboard.
• Unlike the other devices, the Iliad lets you delete documents without connecting to a PC. This is a good usability feature; but a possible danger if the device is loaned out. However it should be standard to back up the contents of devices like this, so even someone ‘accidentally’ deleting items should not be a problem.

Cybook Gen3 Reader

Cost: c. £180
Formats: HTML, TXT, PRC, PalmDoc, PDF, RSS feeds. Images (JPG, PNG, GIF) and MP3s.
Battery life? Documentation says one charge lasts 8,000 page turns. 3 hours to charge.
Size: 4.7″ x 7.4″ x 0.3″. Weighs 6.13 oz. Screen is 800 x 600 pixels.

The good:

• Small and light. In a protective case, which makes it seem bulkier than it is. Case has magnetic close.
• Easy to use – just connect to a USB port, press a button on the device, and copy flles on. No software to install; no online registration required. So it feels more ‘welcoming’ than the other two devices.
• Worked on a Linux PC.

The bad:

• This device has the ‘grittiest’ screen of the three – reminding me of an Etch-a-Sketch.
• Unfortunately there is a Very Bad Feature – the device seems unreliable, and critical system files are stored in a visible location and not rebuilt by the device; therefore a minor corruption of a file can render the device unusable. After working on various PCs, the device failed. Luckily all files were already backed up as a precaution, but somehow while connected over USB there was a problem, and on disconnecting the Cybook just went to a screen with diagonal black, grey and white boxes and would not leave that screen or turn off, or even reset easily. The core files were replaced, but for some reason that didn’t fix the device, and it still failed t oboot (though it showed a different screen). Further, it no longer showed up as a device on any Windows PC, meaning there was no access to the device’s internal memory. The only fix was to download a new kernel and reflash it with an SD card. For any modern consumer electronics device to get into this state so easily is worrying, since it implies bad design or poor manufacturing and quality, making it hard to recommend – especially if it might be loaned out to many people.

The indifferent:

• It caused mixed feelings. Some people hated it; some really liked it. Very few were neutral towards it.
• The fact that I had problems with this device was particularly disheartening because my first mpressions of the device were extremely positive. It was the cheapest device, and there was no need to install software or register the device, making it feel ‘friendlier’.

Conclusions

I have already mentioned some possible uses. The main thing is that as many staff as possible get to try these devices out and assess their possible utility to a library service. If enough staff agree that they could be useful, then the LRC could move on to pilot projects. For some projects copyright issues may need to be investigated too. The robustness of the readers could be tested during the pilots. If the devices do eventually pass into general loan stock, then a special display/promotion could be useful for advertising their availability. And note that if the devices are preloaded with material, then a back-up and restore procedure will be vital.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 27th, 2008 at 1:25 pm and is filed under e-book readers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.