Sony's Yoshitaka Ukita is passionate about his work and, as general manager of the electronics giant's ebook business department in Japan, he has every reason to be a fervent believer in the brave new world he's planning to bring to the Japanese public. The latest development in Ukita's division is arguably the first successful attempt at a proper electronic book with a display that approximates the look of traditional paper. The ebook reader (the Librie EBR-1000EP) launches in Japan on Saturday, and we met with Sony in Tokyo for a sneak preview.
Whisper it quietly, but first impressions of the ¥41,790 (£220) Librie are that it looks a little dowdy. Its grey plastic case is vaguely reminiscent of an old-school PDA, albeit a slim one. Any disappointment vanishes the instant Ukita flips the power switch to bring his baby to life.
The quality of the display will come as quite a shock to any seasoned user of mobile devices; it looks more like paper than the computer screen it is. The closest comparison is to think of old-fashioned ink on pulp you're likely holding now, unless you're reading this online, in which case the Librie looks far better.
In fact, as it's a reflective screen, it looks the same whether you read it indoors or out. At power-up, the Librie presents the ubiquitous Japanese cartoon character to guide you through the electronic library. The mascot is called Libro, after Ukita's three-year-old miniature Schnauzer, whom he acquired in 2001 just as the ebook project was getting off the ground.
The library screen is a straightforward category-based list leading to whatever tomes are stored in the 10MB of memory or on a Memory Stick. After that, it's a simple matter of starting a book from the beginning, or from where you left off (via a bookmark). A single book can handle up to 40 bookmarks, each of which can be annotated, while further notes and text excerpts can be kept in a separate clipboard application.
With a sufficiently large Memory Stick for storage, 500 books can be indexed at any one time, which might just cover a fortnight at the beach. Controls are straightforward, an important factor that should suit the non-technical audience such a product has to win over, with the main ports of call being the buttons to page forward and back and a jog dial for scrolling through menus. While making headway through a book, an image of our canine pal moving along a track appears at the bottom to indicate how far there is to go.
The miniature Qwerty keyboard at the base of the screen gives a hint as to the other applications available.
The Librie comes with three Japanese dictionaries in Rom and an encyclopaedia. Audio content is catered for through a rear-mounted speaker (there's a standard headphone jack, too) and the ability of the BBeB (BroadBand eBook) format to include a degree of multimedia interactivity. Having a novel read out aloud by your book is, it has to be said, rather cool in a Douglas Adams kind of way.
The BBeB specification was developed by Sony to shrink the text of a 250-page book into around 500kb and to incorporate Open MG copy protection to prevent unlimited content copying. Publishers can choose to eschew BBeB and present pages - for example, those in unsupported scripts such as Cyrillic - as graphical images, although the benefits of compression and protection will be lost. Even paper-focused publishers are keeping an eye on ebooks, particularly from a creative point of view. Bruce Rutledge, president of Chin Music Press in Seattle, says: "A lot of traditional books are thrown together these days without much thought to their design or their overall appearance. I think that ebook technology could make inroads here."
After flipping a few virtual pages on his ebook version of Natsume Soseki's classic Botchan, Ukita spends a good 15 minutes explaining just how the crisp ink-like look is achieved. The end product is the result of three years of work on the part of Toppan Printing, Philips, Sony and E Ink Corporation. The display is based on tiny 40-micron diameter microcapsules, which contain dozens of oppositely charged black and white particles suspended in an oil solution.
Electromagnetic fields dictate whether black, white or a combination of both are drawn to the surface of each capsule to render the desired shades - the smallest picture element is the particle, rather than the microcapsule. The finer the degree of control over the fields, the crisper the possible onscreen image. Achieving that control was one of the greatest challenges of the past three years, says Ukita.
The result is a 6in screen with a resolution of 600x800 dots at 170dpi, considerably sharper than the 70-90dpi of a regular computer display. This allows for increasing the text size up to 200% with no degradation. One much-repeated fallacy about the Librie is that power is used only for turning pages. While it is true that the "ink" particles stay in position without consuming power, the electronic innards do drain the juice, hence the inclusion of a standby mode. Nevertheless, the three AAA batteries used to power the Librie should stretch to an impressive 10,000 pages, enough for about 40 novels.
In his enthusiasm, Ukita lets slip that flexible electronic paper which can handle Harry Potter-esque moving images and colour is in the research and development labs and may be just two to three years away.
He has reason to be cautious: the value of the publishing market in Japan is huge - last year saw sales of $22.6bn. Compare this with the $5.6bn spent on music and you'll see why ebooks have the potential to excite. Ukita throws out a statistic that reveals a little of the marketing know-how behind the Librie project.
"The average book in Japan weighs 309g; we designed the Librie to weigh 300g, including case and batteries." Toss in the fact that books retail for around ¥1,200 (£6.30), while downloaded ebooks will cost a fraction of that, and you have the beginnings of a reason to shun paper.
Naturally, there's more to the Librie launch than just the hardware, as getting hold of content has the potential to trip up even the best-laid plans. To keep a tight rein on the flow of ebooks, 15 major publishers and newspapers, including Kodansha, Asahi Shimbun and Yomiuri Shimbun, have teamed up with Sony to form a company called Publishing Link and to provide content through a website known as Timebook Town.
Readers can choose texts from seven sections, or clubs, ranging from business books to novels and may either pay ¥315 (£1.65) for a single title or join that club and gain access to up to five books a month for ¥210 (£1.10) each. Thanks to free house ads in the publications belonging to the megacorps behind Timebook Town, advertising reach should be vast.
The current-generation Libriè has no online capability, so books must be downloaded to a PC (Windows only for now, although the device runs on Sony Linux), then transferred to the reader via its USB 2.0 port or by using a Memory Stick.
Timebook Town texts may be "checked out" to a group of up to four devices, so it's possible to have the same book on a Librie, a home PC, a work PC and perhaps a laptop. Sony offers the efficient Libriè LE for Windows ebook emulator as a free download, for the slightly unappealing experience of reading a novel in front of a computer.
The variety of content appears to cover most bases - there are niche clubs dedicated to language learners and female readers and Timebook-only titles from major authors - but the sting in the tail is that each title is really only borrowed. Thanks to Open MG protection, the content is unreadable after two months, so it's best to think of the Libriè experience as a library of sorts.
The BBeB format also offers publishers and authors full control over peripheral elements, such as whether notes persist after the rental period has expired.
Ukita explains the thinking behind the book club strategy as "an attempt to open up a new market for rental books". However, he is aware that the start-up cost to potential customers is critical. "The publishing people wanted the hardware to cost less than ¥20,000 (£105), but we've gone for something around the price of an electronic dictionary - it's up to the customer to judge if it's a good price."
Whether the convenience of having an armful of books in a pocket-sized reader is worth forsaking building up a physical collection remains to be seen, but if Ukita has his way, we'll soon get used to seeing books in a new, electronic light. For now, he'll be happy with 5,000 Librie sales a month, if Sony's production run is anything to go by.
However, book lovers need not despair at the march of technology. As Rutledge suggests, the simple pleasures of life still retain their appeal.
"For those of us who love the smell and feel of paper, the art of bookbinding, cloth covers with foil stamps and all the rest of the touches that make a book something to covet, ebooks just aren't a very exciting alternative. Nor are they a realistic threat - yet."
Mod cons
6in electronic paper display with E Ink technology
SVGA (800x600 dots)
170dpi
300g with case and batteries (190g without)
126mm x 190mm x 13mm
Motorola Dragonball processor
Sony Linux OS
10MB memory
Memory Stick slot
USB 2.0 port
headphone jack
mono speaker