My wife and I have a problem. We love buying and reading books, but ran out of shelf space for them years ago. So we’ve been storing some of them in closets and boxes while we find a more suitable solution.

Like others we love physicality of books and it is hard to imagine buying artifacts that exist only in digital form. However, while searching for a good solution I did notice that useful life-span of most technical books is only few years and that we would save a lot of space and trees if I bought and read their electronic versions.

This has lead to my renewed interest in state of electronic readers, which I’ve been following on and off since I first heard of technology almost a decade ago. In last few months I got a chance to try first version of Kindle , read few chapters on Sony Reader PRS-505, checked how it feels to do it on iPod touch and read Designing Web Interfaces to the end on Nokia N770. By the way, I can only recommend that book to anyone interested in development of web applications.

So this post will be short overview of my experience so far.

Dedicated electronic readers

As said, I’ve used Kindle1 and Sony PRS-505, although my experience so far has been mostly colored by later. Most if not all such currently available devices are based on same technology, E-ink , and hence offer fairly similar reading experience as far as visuals go.

That experience is very good. It’s not quite paper, but it is certainly much nicer to read than computer screens, especially outside. It’s most annoying current limitation is probably absence of colors and depiction of b&w images in 16 or less shades of gray. You won’t be buying photo books for them any time soon.

What bothered me more though were tendency to use proprietary formats (Kindle) and absence of search (almost everyone else). I expected that device designers would notice that electronic format doesn’t offer a chance to flip through pages and remember position of interesting passages spatially and would counter this by adding a search function, yet most didn’t and as such these devices really are readers and not researchers.

With good technical books I spend more time looking up pieces of information than I spent reading it in the first place. I guess I would be willing to sacrifice search if devices themselves were significantly cheaper, but since they aren’t, I won’t be buying one anytime soon.

Still, if you like reading lots of books but don’t care about owning them, you should really look into them. They are simply magnificient when it comes to packing A LOT of books into tiniest amount of space without sacrificing much readability. Hell, since most if not all readers allow you to set text size, it might even be easier to read on them.

Tablets

I own and use two, iPod touch and ancient Nokia N770 . It’s a common story with multipurpose devices. You get to do a lot with them, but you usually have to sacrifice something compared to specialised gadgets.

I haven’t read much on iPod touch and it’s unlikely I ever will. It has a fairly small screen (and screen resolution) that makes it rather unpleasant to read texts with plenty of tables and diagrams. Pinching screen looks nice on commercials and doesn’t bother me too much when browsing web, but it gets tiresome quickly enough that I don’t want to do it repeatedly.

I also tried Kindle application, which works well enough for literature, but is even more limiting than Kindle device. There is no search and you don’t flip through pages all the time only if you are comfortable with reading text at smallest font size.

Nokia on the other hand has screen good and big enough that I needed to scroll only in one direction. Since that can be done with the same button that is used to flip through pages, I could read book using only one hand, which is nice since it let me read in most impossible body positions. As iPod touch it also has a color screen that is quite useful when dealing with technical material. What it lacks though is search in its PDF viewer that is also missing even in latest maemo incarnation on OS2008 (checked on Fry’s tablet).

Too bad. Nevertheless it will remain my main ebook reading device for foreseeable future.

Other observations

As already noted, I feel current crop of readers are geared mainly to reading books and not much to browsing or searching. Since most of them are built on same technological base, it’s understandable that their hardware is very similar, but I was still surprised to see that same lack of distinction when it comes to features implemented in software.

I thought about buying printed and electronic copy, but changed my mind when I looked at price of the bundle . What I thought I would be buying is convenience. What price suggests to me is a sale of another copy. I probably would buy both, if price of bundle would be up to 15% higher than price of printed version.

That does not mean publishers are wrong, since I am hardly a representative sample, but I suspect I am not the only one who is thinking about building electronic library before they go ahead and purchase a reader. This transitioning phase where readers are not widespread yet might not be long enough to matter anyway and publishers probably don’t care about speeding it along since for most of them devices are just a content transportation mechanism that isn’t owned by them.

Tablets, with screen and resolution big enough work surprisingly well as long as you don’t try to read under direct sun light. Their other downsides are much shorter battery life and need for good eye-sight unless you are willing to scroll a lot.

Still, even though I won’t be buying an electronic reader this year, it is only a matter of time when one of them will replace my tablets as reading device.