I’ve had a few discussions lately about eBook Readers with a number of people, with most people having a strong opinion either way. As a developer, a significant portion of my reading material is textbooks and other technical documents, but at the same time, this doesn’t stop me wanting to read the greatest book of our time.

In the blue corner, weighing in about 500g we have Mr Electronic!

• You can carry hundreds, if not thousands of books around with you at any time.
• Smaller and more compact than a single book in some instances.
• Can provide it’s own light source and you don’t need to find a lamp.
• You can change the font size for the book you are reading if it’s too small to comfortably read.
• You can take notes without defacing it.

In the red corner, weighing in at a massively varying rate: Mr Paper Copy!

• Has the “touch factor”. The intangible benefit of purchasing something solid every time you buy a book. Its smell, its feel and the excitement that can bring.
• Significantly easier to skip to certain points in a book.
• Harder to accidentally break or ruin.

I think the story of the book will go the way of the CD (and the Vinyl record before that). I think it is inevitable that in 10 years or so, as many people that have have MP3 players now, will have an electronic book reader then. But, in just the same way that people still buy CDs, I don’t think they will ever be able to stop making books as they offer a great deal that eBooks never will. So is now the time to start on the eReader bandwagon? Hmmm, I’d say not personally – at least, for my potential reading library it’s not.

You see, good as some of them are, eReaders are burden somewhat with a number technological problems they must tackle firstly. In general, eReaders can be broken into two categories: those with eInk & those without. Those with include the two heavy hitters of Amazon Kindle and the Sony Reader eBook, while two of the main other rivals would be a netbook (a standard laptop or PC would be ok, though less portable) and the Apple iPad (with the HP Slate coming soon it seems).

eInk is an absolutely fantastic technology which is very early in its lifespan and I imagine we haven’t seen the end of it and its children – nor will me for a number of years yet. eInk is significant because it gets around a problem that has plagued electronic devices for a long time: Battery Life. When used within eReaders, eInk only consumes battery power when the page is changed (or the display changes). This means that the device can hold its power for not just days, but weeks of usage! The other advantage of the eInk is that it causes around and about the same amount of eye strain as a standard book. Because the screen technology is not based on the intensely fast flickering of pixels, the screens appear to be paper and lack the issues of glare from other bright light sources. The article over on the manufacturers website, it works like:

The principal components of electronic ink are millions of tiny microcapsules, about the diameter of a human hair. In one incarnation, each microcapsule contains positively charged white particles and negatively charged black particles suspended in a clear fluid. When a negative electric field is applied, the white particles move to the top of the microcapsule to become visible to the reader. This makes the surface appear white at that location. At the same time, an opposite electric field pulls the black particles to the bottom of the microcapsules where they are hidden. By reversing this process, the black particles appear at the top of the capsule, which now makes the surface appear dark at that location.

For about a year, another “Format War” raged between the ePub format and the standard PDF. While each format has it’s pro’s and con’s – the big thing that has become an issue is the failure of PDF to scale well with the eInk. While the Sony device does a better job, the Amazon Kindle plain old can’t be bothered to try and limits the text scalability and in some cases offers almost illegible text to it’s reader. When you way all this together, the eInk devices have a really big failing, and that is the displaying of Images and Diagrams. They just plain suck at offering zoom-able content. The quick amongst you may have realised that books also don’t offer this feature – however, this is generally less of an issue because the dimensions of the images on printed copies are within the publishers control. They can control what size their image is being viewed at, which is not true with the different sized eReader screens (the Kindle alone offers a 6″ and 9.7″ version). As a side note, as printed copies have a significantly higher DPI ratio, a magnifying class would aid in the instances that the text became too small to read on a diagram – this isn’t likely to be often true of the eReaders). This problem is where my issue with eReaders lies. I can’t read my copy of Code Complete on an eReader because I wouldn’t necessarily be able to see the diagrams that accompany the text – a potential disastrous flaw.

This problem is solved though! Along with the potential issue that eInk can only currently display grey-scale. Hurrah! The Apple iPad will allow you to zoom and otherwise get bigger versions of these diagrams and providing the document was prepared by a sane person who knows what they are doing, you’ll have absolutely no problem. Let’s all go buy an iPad! All hail Steve Jobs!… Not quite just yet, you see, they implemented a flaw. Battery life is back and although not crippling like the iPhone’s can be at times, 10 hours compared with longer than 10 days is a massive difference! The argument is that no one reads for 10 hours straight, maybe not, but people could easily use 10 hours of the device without having the chance to charge it.

A bonus however, is that with the iPad you get a plethora of other features (iPod, usable Internet, picture gallery, email, pretty much what you’d expect a low end PC to be able to achieve without too much hassle). Is this something you’d want – it would depend what you already have I guess.

So overall – what’s the bottom line? Well, I guess that the market doesn’t have a great product at the moment. If you are going to read mainly novels and you would benefit from being able to carry around a number of books around with you rather than just one or two (frequent long train journeys or other travelling), then maybe the Amazon Kindle or Sony Reader would be a great choice. However, if you prefer a device that is capable of displaying images and photographs in full colour and to the detail that they were intended, as well as offering the benefit of other multimedia functions, then the Apple iPad, HP Slate (when it arrives) or just a standard netbook (if you can cope with the discomfort and less than ideal user experience) would be the choices for you.