And in this corner...

The other day I heard about a possible challenger to the Sony Reader for the eBook platform that may finally make eBooks worthwhile. It's called the "iLiad" and it's made by a Norwegian company called iRex. The technology, best I can tell is very similar to the Sony Reader's, though it is very slightly thicker and just a bit heavier. Unlike the Sony version, it has wireless LAN and a stylus for interacting on the screen. You can find details at http://www.irextechnologies.com/shop/products/iliad.htm.

Both the Sony Reader and the iLiad will debut about the same time (Sony says "Spring 2006," the iLiad says April 2006). Sony has announced their reader will cost about $350, but I haven't seen any pricing estimates on the iLiad. The possibility exists that they will price it slightly less in order to compete with Sony's huge marketing share (while they are essentially an unknown), but since they reader seems to do a bit more, maybe not. I have not seen a good screen shot that tells me anything about the quality of the screens, nor has the iLiad given any battery life estimates that I've seen (the Sony will last some 7500 hours before needing to be recharged -- more than enough). The touch screen may end up being a disadvantage for the iLiad. Remember, the idea is to replace the paperback book. The touch screen means having interact with it like a Palm Pilot; it also means that the screen will be more fragile than the Sony design. The idea for iLiad is that you can read a full newspaper on screen and click on a column of text to have it magnified and "floating" above the page. It's a good paradigm, but I'm not sure it's really worth the extra trouble and bother. You can read the news in a single-story format just as easily, I think, and since I don't really read newspapers anyway, that's not a big draw.

What does worry me a bit is that Sony will do something dumb to preserve "intellectual property rights" on the content as they have done with Mp3 files. I don't take kindly to someone installing spyware on my machine. Not only that, Sony could make the same mistake Apple did with the Mac. The PC was open architecture, so took over the world. If you want to introduce a new technology, you've got to have lots of avenues for content purchases, not just the Sony Connect Store. I'm not at all sure Sony has made that connection, although supposedly the Sony Reader will also read PDFs (after they have been converted). A PDF would have to be carefully formatted to be the size of a paperback instead of a letter-sized sheet, as most are now. Easily done, but not all publishers will think to do it. We'll see, but no matter how you look at it, having a competitor for Sony is a good thing. My only hope is that they don't go the Beta-VHS route and use mutually exclusive formats...