Technology update

So, I bet you want to know what's the newest word in the world of the internet, don't you? Sure you do. You want to know about the latest evolution of blogs and hardware goodies.

Well, it's me, so we're starting with books. E-books. The holy grail of book technology for the last several years has been the development of a convenient, easy to read and use e-book reader. And now we've got two: the Sony Reader and the Amazon Kindle.

The basics are that these gadgets are the size and approximate weight of a paperback book. They're specially designed for easy-on-the-eyes reading and the ability to navigate through files books in a way that's more like flipping through the pages of a book, rather than scrolling through a PDF or Word document. They each have wireless internet connectivity and a library--or more accurately, store--of e-books that you can download, and they have some storage built in with the option for extra storage space on plug-in cards. And you can transfer files from your computer onto the gizmos. Also, they both play music, except that the Reader doesn't accept audio book format (the Kindle does).

But the Reader doesn't have a great library and charges a lot for material, while the Kindle has Amazon's spectacular library but charges a small fee for almost everything. The Reader accepts a range of common text formats, while the Kindle only accepts a proprietary e-book format and PDF (which has display problems on this device). But it's fairly easy to convert other e-book formats into the proprietary format. The Kindle has much better internet access, and an extremely minimalist browser that lets you look at webpages...in a highly crappy way. On the other hand, you can subscribe (yes, for a fee) to various websites, magazines, and newspapers...but this means you're paying not only to read the New York Times, but also C/Net's website. But it does have automatic access to Wikipedia.

And the Kindle does one other supremely cool thing: self-publishing. You can upload your own work into the store and sell it for your own price! How cool is that?

Of course, neither of these trinkets are cheap: the Reader is, I believe, around $300, while the Kindle is $400. Technophiles and book lovers are hoping that either the price on the devices and e-books will either come down, or that they might switch over to some kind of subscription service ala Netflix, because at the moment, we're looking at about $10 per e-book, which means it's still cheaper to buy them at Borders.