Is the future epaper?

I was just at Borders, doing a bit of holiday research. Yes, you're probably getting a carbon-based gift. Anyway. I saw the most beautiful (non-sexual) sight ever: the Sony Reader. The damn thing is just called Reader. Hey, corporate assholes, there should be a happy medium between the Reader and Wii. Try and find it! Wow, side-tracked again. OK, time to start a new paragraph.

The Reader is a portable e-book reader. The thing that sets this puppy apart from the readers of a few years ago, IMO, is epaper. See, I picked up this thing and thought to myself "hmm, not bad, though it would have been nice for them to put a real reader on display, not this plastic prop that's too light to be real and has this fake screen that looks like it's just printed paper under a cover". Then, the damn printed paper changed. This thing is light as hell, looks like it's actually printed on paper, is visible from every angle I tried and is tossable. See, that last part is something my dad remarked on: electronic readers will not be popular until you can toss them down like you would a paperback. He was talking about the e-readers a few years ago, the mostrosities that would crack if you dropped a feather on them. While I didn't try dropping it on the floor, it seems that this model can withstand more anger than anything before it. However, the best part of the whole deal is that the screen actually looks like paper, while allowing you to push a button and skip a dozen pages at a whim or rotate the page and read it in landscape mode.

I'd have bought the Reader right there and then, but something stopped me. See, it's something I like to refer to as reason. For all its pluses, and these are pretty big ones, the Reader does have quite a few flaws.

The first, and a semi-serious one, is the 350$ price tag. While the coolness and the high-tech factors almost make it a bargain, my wallet would hurt afterward.

Second, the fact that the Reader is made by Sony. See, Sony has this most un-nerving quirk about them: "proprietary standards" is tattooed into every employee's left butt-cheek. Sony can't help but to attempt to convert the entire consumer base to their brand of crap on every product release. Memory stick and minidisc spring to mind. The Reader is no different. While you can read PDF's, DOC's and TXT's, you first have to convert them to Sony's proprietary format. "Even TXT's?" you say? Yes, even TXT's. It's not that I have that big a problem with converting a couple files, it's the whole idea that makes me want to puke. Standards are good. Proprietary or closed standards are evil. It's that simple. Microsoft standarads are yet another breed of evil. And that's another type of post altogether.

Third, and this is the most important one, is the fact that I don't read main-stream books. You won't find "Da Vinci Code" in my library. Or Chrichton. Or Rowling. My favorites are Niven, Heinlein and Vonnegut, to name the most popular ones. Sony's Connect e-book service has 1 Niven (read it), 1 Heinlein (read it), and 3 Vonnegut's (read 1 of 3). Either I have to start in on Oprah's Book Club (*sound of me vomitting*) or develop a serious need to be accepted and load up on self-help books for idiots. That's not the "Idiots" series of books, BTW: I do mean self-help books that are written specifically for idiots. Go through a shelf of these next time you're in a bookstore and see if you can go 5 minutes without laughing or crying. Seriously, there are like 10,000 e-books out there, and very few of these are sci-fi. I don't want to change genres, I like what I read.

Honestly, how hard is it to release electronic copies at the same time as carbon ones? You already have the book in an electronic database somewhere, just convert it to PDF (or whatever) and you're practically printing money. It's the same rip-off as the cell-phone company charging a dime for every text message: the infrastructure is there and sending a piece of data costs you nothing at all. I'd like to see someone step up and offer my favorite sci-fi paperbacks and a way to download that same book in electronic format, once you've purchased the hard-copy. After all, does it make a whole lot of sense for me to have to buy the PDF's of "The Playboy Book: Fifty Years" and "Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense" when I already have them in hardcover?