iTunes is ok, but when do I get my iBooks? Sony’s much-ballyhooed ebook reader, the Sony Reader, finally releases this month. This is a third-generation reader after the Sony Librie and a Toshiba predecessor. It uses e-ink to present a reflective, 160 dpi screen which looks almost as good as paper and requires no power to maintain the image:

… once those microspheres have formed the image of a page, they stay put without consuming any power. Amazingly enough, that means that you don’t have to turn the Reader off, ever. When you’re done for the night, just lay it on your bedside table; the current page remains on the screen without draining any battery power. (According to Sony, one prototype Reader in Japan has been displaying the same page for three years on a single charge.) [Link - thanks, Ennis]

Despite the sensuality of rough-cut pages and a lovely binding, I have little attachment to hardcopy. What’s far more annoying:

• Can’t forward snippets to friends
• Can’t click a link for a definition or a Wikipedia entry
• Can’t crank up the text size for legibility
• Can’t highlight passages without ruining the book
• Lugging around heavy tomes
• Giving away my collection every time I move
• Losing all my work, my dog-ear bookmarks of sensually-written passages, songs to listen to and references to look up

Sorry, papyrus fetishists: $25 printouts suck. This smugness over hardcopy books is silly, and tech laggards should never review tech for major pubs:

The masses, however, may continue to prefer the more established portable-document format. Those older reading machines never run out of power, cost about 2 percent as much and don’t break when dropped. You know: p-books. [Link]

When the wheel was invented, the NYT’s David Pogue would’ve extolled the advantages of legs.

The reader is the size of a slim paperback and weighs 9 ounces. You can download and read loads of books on one device, dog-ear pages, skip ahead 10%, read RSS feeds, PDF files and books out of copyright for free. A single charge lasts for 7,500 pages. You can’t yet search, highlight or save and forward snippets.

The biggest downside, as always, seems to be the DRM: you can read a single e-book on six PCs or devices and cannot give it away to a friend when you’re done. Page turns reportedly come with an annoying flicker. 160 dpi resolution isn’t really print-quality — you’d need 300 dpi minimum, preferably 600 dpi, to be a reasonable facsimile of print. $350 is steep for what is basically a lobotomized, large-screen PDA. These weaknesses will all inevitably be addressed as readers mature.

As long as Sony gets the hardware right, the key is going to be the breadth of ebooks available. Some of the latest desi lit, such as Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown, is available, and the price is right: at $8, it’s half the cost of a paperback. Lots of new business and political nonfiction, such as Bob Woodward’s State of Denial, is available. You can download books from home, just like iTunes. But lots of the back catalog is not yet available, such as the new Booker Prize winner, The Inheritance of Loss; Rana Dasgupta’s Tokyo Cancelled; and Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games. You can check if your favorite titles are available.

Now just make the reader flexible, searchable, faster and thinner, give me a choice of vendors, and we’ll have a deal.

Gizmodo has more.