Panasonic e-book reader
We're sure that in an ideal near future this kind of thing is going to be obsolete because of foldable thin displays and suchlike, but Panasonic have announced the launch of a fairly cool-looking electronic book terminal, the SigmaBook.
Cool in a gadget sense, yes, but we won't spend too much time on this one because we'll get all heated up about the proprietary DRM they've included, the fact that it doesn't seem possible to load in any of the myriad out-of-copyright works available for free in both English and Japanese, and the fact that the list of compatible works to be offered for sale looks terrible. In short, this looks like something that Panasonic is trying to sell the publishing industry on as a way of combating falling sales, bundling it up with DRM to reassure everyone that it's pirate-proof.
Oh, and you can read MS Office docs on it if you convert them into bitmap files first.
Y37,000, out Feb. 20 in Japan.
[Update] OK, now we're really annoyed. A look at the affiliated book site shows that they're selling, in one example we checked, a copyright-expired work as a 7.2MB, Y300 download when you can pick it up as a free, 140k text download at Japan's popular fiction equivalent of the Gutenberg Project, Aozora Library (Japanese only).
[Via K-Tai Watch (Japanese)]
Posted by aragoto at January 30, 2004 05:19 PM | TrackBack