E-Book Report

By JOSHUA QUITTNER

Some nights, I wish my wife had an e-book, one of those battery-powered gadgets with high-resolution screens that can hold thousands of pages of best-selling text. I have always been a Princess and the Pea kind of sleeper. The slightest noise--even the sound of a page being turned--is enough to make me sit bolt upright, as if a torpedo had just slammed into the powder room. E-books are noiseless. Also, since they are backlit, your bedmate can read them in the dark.

I decided this was as good a reason as any to take one of the new gizmos for a test drive. My timing was perfect, since the battle of the e-books is beginning to heat up. You can't find them at Barnes & Noble yet, but barnesandnoble.com last week started selling NuvoMedia's Rocket eBook ($499). And Rocket's main competitor, SoftBook Press, is now selling its notebook-size device for $299--if you agree to buy $19.95 worth of books monthly for two years. Given the slim library currently available for the SoftBook (fewer than 139 titles), the purchase plan could be a gamble.

So I tried the Rocket eBook, which has a library of 486 books that can be downloaded from the Barnes & Noble website. The device can stand alone or sit in a cradle that attaches to your PC; your browser then becomes the way you find stuff to read--either books at B&N or websites whose content, images and all, can be downloaded free.

The process is relatively painless. First you register your eBook on the Internet to get the user name and password you'll need to make purchases online. Then you browse the B&N website. When you select a book you want, it's encrypted and beamed to your desktop computer. You can store it there or send it on to your eBook using a simple "librarian" software interface.

You'll find more than a few frustrations, however. For instance, since the books are distributed as bytes online rather than on expensive paper, you might expect to get a break on price. You don't. For example, Into Thin Air, which I bought, costs $6.39 whether you get it in paperback or electronic-book format. And forget about instant delivery. It can take hours for your order to be processed and your book delivered. (In my case, it took significantly longer since the e-mail address I used to set up my eBook was different from the one I had used to set up a barnesandnoble.com account. As a result all my purchases were rejected at first.)

In fact, I found I had more fun with my eBook when I wasn't reading books. A software upgrade released last week allows you to transfer text documents (e-mail, Microsoft Word files and the like) from your computer to your eBook and read them there. It also enables you to upload your own writings to its website, which could someday turn into a novel venue for would-be novelists.

But eBook's price is still too steep for all but the most motivated readers. Light sleepers and their spouses are certainly in that group. As are people who don't want to lug around a ton of books when they're on the road. The visually impaired especially may appreciate a feature that lets you increase the font size, making eBooks considerably easier on the eyes than the average paperback. For everyone else, though, I'd say stick with paper--at least for now.

For more on the Rocket eBook, go to www.nuvomedia.com Any questions for Quittner? E-mail him at [email protected]