3. An EBook For The Ages

Sony's PRS-500 is the best incarnation of a book in electronic form I have ever seen. Instead of taking an old technology and pressing it into eBook service, Sony asked a simple question. What is book and how does it function?

Put simply, a book is a collection of printed paper pages. You go to a brick and mortar or online library or bookstore to obtain books. To follow a story or an author's line of thinking, you start reading a book at the beginning and usually work your way to the end. This requires the ability to see the words on the pages of the book, knowing how to read and turning the pages. Like other multitaskers, some book aficionados like to read more than one book at a time and many like to mark pages that have significant quotes or other information on them. That's pretty much it.

Books have some shortcomings. Like most Tablet PCs, they're awkward to hold in one hand and even with two hands some can be heavy and difficult to manage. People who have the use of only one hand often need some sort of book holder to keep their place and those who can use neither hand have even greater needs. The print in some books is so small as to be unreadable by many. Finally, books seem to multiply at the speed of light in some homes, quickly taking up shelf and floor space like some sort of every growing science fiction monster.

One of many sets of shelves piled high with books at the Gerber's