You hear it all the time from us traditional book defenders and many times it is the first arrow we throw. Margret Atwood threw it at the recent London Book Fair.
– You can’t read an e-book in the bathtub!
Well maybe you can.
Chris Steib has recently undertaken “the Ultimate eBook Experiment”
His contestants:
A paperback copy of Thomas Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49 and A Sony Reader.
Steib puts each through a rigorous 6 step program that runs from “functionality” testing to submersion in water dressed in GLAD Cling wrap.
The clear winner:
The Sony Reader. The Reader would have swept the competition if it wasn’t so expensive.
Just wait, in a few years they will give you the reader for free if you commit to buying a certain amount of e-books a month.
Then what?
Steib’s also has a quality review of the Sony Reader titled Tech Review: the Sony eBook Reader
He is also editor in chief of the very intriguing Void Magazine “a free web-based publication devoted to serving the needs of today’s ever-evolving literary community by facilitating an ongoing literary conversation.”