Guest Blogger: Ian Hocking

There's a storm coming. At least, that's what Sarah Connor told me at the end of The Terminator. She was looking at a future in which humanity would be enslaved by the very technology it had hoped to set it free. Is this the inevitable result of bringing microprocessors to bear on the old school elements of our culture? What could be further from technology than literature? The storm, however, cometh. The music industry was hit first. Tracks are easy to digitise, fast to download, fast to upload (and thus to share), and easy to experience using a portable player, such as the most successful consumer object of the Noughties: the Apple iPod.

A few weeks back, spurred on by the example of this blog's author (I refer readers to Scott's blaggatry of the Sony eReader), I thought I'd try my hand at snagging a review unit of a similar Reader. The one I received was the COOL-ER Reader. It costs from around £180 at various sticky junctions on the web.

Since this isn't my blog (this is), you probably don't know who I am. My name is Ian Hocking. I'm an academic psychologist (no, not a psychoanalyst; tell me about your mother another time). One of my interests is human-computer interaction (HCI). I'm also a novelist.

Let us go then, you and I, into the review proper. I have not played with any other ebook Readers, so I really don't know how this one compares to the several others on the market. My perspective is simple: How does reading a book on the COOL-ER compare with my beloved, dead-tree format?

First impressions

If you're going to steal a design, you should steal from the best, and the COOL-ER Reader is clearly inspired by the late 2006 iPod Nano (second generation), from its anodised metal finish to the circular thumb pad used to navigate onscreen menus. The unit weighs only 178g (just over 6oz), which is lighter than most of the books on my shelf.

The e-ink display is a standard six inches in height, somewhat smaller than a trade paperback but equivalent to the display used by the Amazon Kindle. E-ink is a display technology intended to imitate the way that ink appears on paper. It is not backlit; has a low refresh rate (problematic for menus and other interactive user-interface elements); and has extremely low power consumption. The absence of backlighting means that, for most people, the headaches associated with reading on laptop- and desktop-computer displays are avoided.

The Reader has no wireless connectivity. To get books onto it, you need to either copy them to an SD card and insert this into the top of the device, or connect the Reader via USB to your computer (where it will appear as a drive).

The device has several hardware buttons. There is a circular pad on the front that permits the user to click in all four compass directions. It also has a central button that means 'do it'. Running along the left-hand spine are four buttons. They allow the user to access the built-in music player, change the text orientation between portrait and landscape, browse the device's library of books, and bring up a contextual menu much like the one that appears on a PC when you right-click the mouse. There is also a reset switch to defibrillate the device when it crashes into silicon VF, and a panel through which you can access the built-in battery. On a full charge, the battery is good for 8000 page turns. (An e-ink display requires power only when the page is refreshed.)

The Reader comes pre-loaded with several books: 'Pride and Prejudice', 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland', 'The Hunchback of Notre Dame', and others. For the most part, these are plain-text (i.e. unformatted) volumes pre-downloaded from Project Gutenberg.

The Good

The Reader is a perky little chap. Members of my family made cooing noises upon first glance and were pleased by its lightness in the hand. The built-in music player is a nice bonus. It can play most audio formats, including copy-protected audiobooks from Audible. The thumb pad rests naturally under your thumb (if you're a rightie). The e-ink display is clear and reads well; unlike computer-based displays, its clarity improves the more light you throw on it.

The technologies within the COOL-ER Reader represent outstanding advances in engineering. However, if it wants to achieve the design/function perfection of ink and paper, never mind reaching the heights of an 'iPod for books', there is a great deal more work to be done on its user interface and its ebook ecosystem.

With me, reader. With me.

The Bad

Snow Crash

So it's a couple of days before Christmas. I've just unboxed the Reader and I'm playing with it. My girlfriend sidles over and asks to take a look. I hand it over, steeple my fingers and raise one eyebrow.

"What do you think?" I ask.

"It doesn't work."

"Schnucki," I say, raising my other eyebrow and sharing a look of exasperation with my parents' terrier, Terry. "Use the thumb pad at the bottom."

"Still doesn't bloody work."

"You and computers. Give it here."

I retrieve the Reader and start fiddling with it. My smug smile loses its edge.

"Well?"

"Hmm. It doesn't seem to 'work' in the accepted sense of that term."

My girlfriend had crashed the Reader.

Traditional books can be dropped in the bath, launched into the next country by catapult, and even given to small children. They might look battered, but they still work. My girlfriend had pressed one button and the software on the device had locked up; it could only be restarted by inserting a pen into the reset switch. This has happened four times in the two weeks I've been using it. I would say that's not good enough.

The Grandmother Test

The next person to play with the Reader was my 90-year-old grandmother. She has been reading books all her life. For the last few years, these books have been large-print. The ebook Reader should be perfect for her. Because the display is computer generated, the text size can be increased at will.

First problem: My grandmother could not read the largest text size on the e-ink display, even in sunlight. This might sound strange - given that the text is larger than the text in her large-print books - until you remember that an e-ink display is not quite the equivalent of ink on paper. For starters, the resolution of e-ink is poorer; the curves in letters are relatively jagged. Second, paper is very white and ink is very black. This is not the case with e-ink. Here, the background is light grey and the text is dark grey. The contrast ratio is poorer. Because the contrast ratio is such an important factor in readability, e-ink is harder to read.

This is a shame because accessibility for visually-impaired users should be one of the triumphs of such technology. The software on the Reader needs to compensate for the poor contrast ratio by allowing the text to be very large indeed.

Second problem: The thumb pad is much too fiddly. She found that it needed such a squeeze to register a click that it was difficult to keep the click accurate (i.e. go forward or back a page). The thumb pad needs to be larger, more responsive, and have greater travel. Never mind the buttons on the side. They are miniscule - narrower than my fingernail - and almost impossible to identify without holding the device an inch from your nose.

The Ugly

Advancing through a book is an unpleasant business. You click 'east' on the thumb pad, and then you wait. Sometimes the click is registered (a light at the top of the device flashes); sometimes it is not. As far as I can tell, this is not due to the e-ink technology but the ARM processor powering the device. It takes the slow road and occasionally stops to pee in the bushes. Furthermore, when you do advance a page, the e-ink needs to refresh with a full-page flash. This annoyance is not the fault of the Reader per se - rather the embryonic nature of e-ink - but is certainly a distraction.

Just as the design of the thumb pad makes you appreciate how revolutionary the iPod click-wheel was as a user interface controller, reading an ebook makes you appreciate just how skilled a job typesetting can be. When you open up a physical book at random, you are presented with a page that has been meticulously composed by hand: fonts, kerning, ligature, line spacing, placement of page numbers, and all the good stuff you don't notice. The COOL-ER just can't do this. In part, it's because the Reader is designed to present unformatted (and therefore reflowed) text. To take the included ebook 'Pride and Prejudice' as an example, I was greeted every three or four screens with a blank page that contained only metadata like the filename (who wants to know that?) and the source (Project Gutenberg). It is a persistent annoyance. You wonder: In the years it took to develop this device, why didn't somebody actually read a book on it, notice this metadata mix-up, and disptach a minion to sort it out?

I thought that Adobe PDF files would render perfectly. After all, PDF is a 'portable document format' designed to maintain layout to the specification of the creator. Not so. First off, not all PDFs are created equal. Under the bonnet, they are very complex things that can be rendered in different ways on different devices. The COOL-ER Reader rendered several of my test PDFs in wildly different ways (using my Mac as a reference), struggled with graphics (sometimes crashing) and, for the most part, rendered text unreadably small without the option of increasing its size.

There is a COOL-ER eBook store where you can download books specially formatted for the Reader. (A small annoyance associated with this: COOL-ER want you to use Adobe Digital Editions as your ebook library manager, and it is a typically bloated Adobe application that had me doing a Muttley in short order.) Here I downloaded 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' for free. The book certainly rendered more sensibly, but even then not correctly. Page breaks were random and the pagination suffered from the same quirk as it does for plain text files: the Reader considers an arbitrary number of words (say 500) as one page, which means that you can refresh several screens before the current page is incremented.

The Forecast: A Mighty Wind

Overall, this is an interesting but expensive and frustrating device. Most of the frustration stems from the user interface and the onboard software. The unit simply needs more development. As one last example, the splash logo that adorns the screen when the device is off does not erase cleanly during the boot sequence, leaving a ghostly afterimage. When I first saw this, I thought I'd received a unit with a broken screen. Again: Has nobody in the development team used this product and sighed heavily at such things?

For the COOL-ER to succeed, vertical integration needs to be improved. That is, the path between the user and the book shop needs to be ensmoothened. You're advised (by COOL-ER) to use their ebook store, but the books you download ('The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn', at least) have an amateurish, wonky feel that makes you feel that the experience isn't yet ready for prime time. Worse, these ebooks will cost you an amount approaching that of the physical book. A person who has bought a Reader for £180 will want to recoup some of their purchases from cheaper ebooks, and that may not happen to the degree they expect (though you can, of course, get many classic books for free at Project Gutenberg and other places).

So the COOL-ER is some way from beating the reading experience of ink and paper (a technology that's worked admirably for over three thousand years). We saw the same transition at the turn of the century in the digital camera sphere; the first ones were poor, but it was obvious that we'd all be using digital cameras before long. Verily cometh the storm.

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Ian Hocking is the author of the Sci-Fi thriller Deja Vu.

Comments

[hagelrat]

Will link to this for our ereader smackdown this weekend if that's ok with everyone.

[Ian Hocking]

Fine by me, hagelrat.

[Maria]

What file types does it read? (Epub, mobi, pdf, html???)

Thanks for the analysis!

Maria

[Scott Pack]

Of course, share away!

[Ian Hocking]

Maria, the Reader supports PDF, EPUB, FB2, RTF, TXT, HTML, PRC, JPG and MP3. However, it's important to note that elements of the formatting for each of those may not be rendered correctly (particularly PDF).

[Scott Pack]

I have a Sony Reader (which I reviewed on here last year) and now a Kindle which I will review shortly. Will be interesting to compare them to Ian's Cool-ER review.

[Maria]

Thanks Ian--my three books are on Amazon Kindle, but also on Smashwords.com in EPUB and HTML--thus I'm always trying to make sure that I have the "right" formats available. I well understand the formatting issues. Even though I start from one file, the files not only look different in each format, they look different on every reader application I have tried (So the same EPUB file looks different on mobipocket and Adobe reader.)

Thanks for the review. I find this sort of thing useful.

Scott, I'll be looking for your Kindle review!!!