Chamber Four

Don't be frightened by the perfectReader's awesomeness. It is a force for good.

It’s the runup to the Kindle 2.0’s announcement (I hope) during the big press conference next Monday. Over the next week, I’ll be doing a series of posts about the new Kindle and how its reality stacks up to the potential of ereaders.

Today: my vision of a perfect ereader. Tomorrow, my predictions for Kindle 2.0. Next week, I’ll compare the real new Kindle to what I hope for, and what I expect.

Today’s criteria for the perfect ereader are not realistic, mostly because intercorporate feuding is hampering the development of these potentially phenomenal devices. But also because it takes time and money to develop technology.

This list assumes an unlimited budget and unlimited time frame, with the lone goal of creating the best, most useful ereader possible for ebook readers. A tall order, but the benefits are not just a great ereader but a genuine candidate to replace paper the way Plastic Logic looks to be attempting. (In fact, the Plastic Logic reader could well be the device that outshines the Reader and Kindle, except that it’s not slated for aggressive release for another year.)

Let’s get on with it! The perfect ereader….

• Perfect readability: This means an anti-glare, matte screen, and perfect contrast. This is the Sony Reader’s Achilles heel, but no ereader has the contrast of a paper book yet. They should.

• Form factor: Plastic Logic has a great-looking design, but it’s the size of a cafeteria tray. I’d like something like that, but with an option for a smaller version, too, unless your primary market consists of cartographers and architects. And metal is the way to go, as any Sony Reader or iPod (not iPhone 3G) user will attest to.

• Color display: This would be phenomenal, but it should probably wait until someone masters black and white E-Ink.

• Frontlight with no sacrifices: Not a backlight; I want it to look like I switched on a lamp, not a screen. Not easy, but that’s why it’s the perfect ereader. (Sony’s frontlight is on the way, but not there yet.)

• Open wireless: It must be convenient to get instant content anywhere with Kindle’s whispernet, but I’d hate to be lashed to proprietary, DRM content from one provider. Open the whispernet up to third-party retailers, and let them pay the fees, instead of passing them to customers. According to TeleRead.org, Sony’s working on this.

• However, firm limits on wireless: Cory Doctorow makes a great point about internet-capable machines being unsuited for long-form reading. So I don’t want a reader that’s also a portable internet station, I can use a netbook or an iPhone for that. Instead limit the wireless to content subscription and distribution, like an Apple App Store for books. The reduced bandwidth necessary will also make the freeness of it possible.

• Touchsreen interface: Consider this and the next three items the usability package: the steps on the path toward completely replacing paper. We start with a touchscreen interface like the Sony Reader PRS-700 already has. Another few iterations will smooth out the minor flaws and make ereaders as easy and intuitive as iPhones. A physical keyboard is simply too cumbersome to be worth it; aim to make a touchscreen interface for people who are constantly writing notes, and it’ll be perfect for everybody else, too.

• Word processing by hand: I want to see the ability to write in (virtual) margins and edit open documents with gestures and even handwriting recognition. This would not only make note-taking more seamless, it would open up ereaders to a whole host of practical applications from filling out forms at the doctor’s office to doing the crossword during your commute. Not to mention, you know, working.

• Bluetooth: For students, it would be pretty slick to be able to toss quotes to your laptop, complete with citations custom-formatted from books’ metadata. For a whole lot of people, if you could throw a report on your reader, edit it by stylus on the train, and then toss it back to your laptop (or a projector, or a printer) when you got to work or school, the device would become an integral part of your working life.

• Serious processor: PRS-700 has 800 MHz, which is pretty good. But I want 2 GHz at least, and probably a dual-core processor. I want enough muscle to make all this interacting with content as easy as it would be on a laptop. The first company that gets all this usability stuff right could tap into an enormous student/business market, and rope in a lot of people who don’t even read books.

• Two Three sizes: A paperback size, for people who read mostly novels, and a plus-size for textbooks and magazines. And let’s say a mid-size for the paper replacement model.

• Completely backward compatible: No matter what ereader you had before, this one will read the books you got for it. Again, corporate foolishness is in the way.

• Price: Let’s say $200 and ebooks cost 75% as much as regular books. Keep it at around $400 and I want ebooks for half the cost of paper books, plus no DRM.

Anyway, I could see someone releasing a device with all of the above–and the perfect price point–in about five years. This should be the goal: a powerful ereader that doesn’t make sacrifices in interface, content acquisition, or readability. While it would have serious features like word processing, it doesn’t need to try to be a whole computer, at least not yet. A document specialist device would be fine, and pretty popular, I think (I’d get two).

None of these things are particularly groundbreaking, what’s missing is just the combination of well-executed features, and versions of most of these feature are available either in ereaders or tablet PCs. That’s what’s so frustrating about current ereaders: it would be simple to make an outstanding one from existing designs and functions, and yet Sony and Amazon make it look so hard.

Let’s hope it’s the E-Ink learning curve that’s holding these companies back, and that, within another generation or two, the features will start to improve exponentially.

Next week: we’ll see how Kindle 2.0 stacks up.