iRex Iliad review

The “howls”:http://www.boingboing.net/2007/11/20/amazon-kindle-the-we.html “of”:http://www.kottke.org/remainder/07/11/14512.html “derision”:http://ezraklein.typepad.com/blog/2007/11/more-kindle-com.html greeting the announcement of the Amazon Kindle last week reminds me that I never got around to reviewing the “iRex Iliad”:http://www.irextechnologies.com/products/iliad that I bought some months ago. I can’t provide a proper comparison of the two; not only do I not own a Kindle, obviously, but I haven’t even used the Iliad to read DRM-protected books (this has only become a possibility in the last few months; before that you were limited to PDFs and the like). But for my particular purposes as an academic, the Iliad works very well. It’s still a first generation technology, and has several kinks that could, and should, be ironed out. Even so, what I’ve seen convinces me that academics are likely to become early adopters of this technology _en masse_ when it comes down in price and becomes a little more user friendly.



Amanda of “Household Opera”:http://householdopera.typepad.com/household_opera/2007/11/count-me-among.html describes the kind of e-book reader that many academics might want to own, and lays out the reasons why Kindle doesn’t cut it.

I think a lightweight e-book reader with a good readable screen would be absolutely swell (especially given how much library school reading I’m taking on my Thanksgiving travels, and how I get twitchy if I go anywhere without something to read). But on the other hand, I wouldn’t want it to be tied to a specific vendor, and I’d want to be able to use it as a catchall reading device for all the random stuff I get from the ‘net — especially journal articles from databases, free e-texts from here and there, and text-heavy web pages I’d rather not read on a computer screen. The thing is, Kindle will let you surf the web and download things, but they have to be either in Amazon’s proprietary format, in .txt format, or in mobipocket format. If you want to read HTML or PDF files, you have to pay to e-mail them to your Kindle so it can convert them.

The Iliad is a fair bit closer to what academics like Amanda are looking for; close enough that I feel that even if I haven’t gotten to the promised land, I’ve at least gotten a few decent glimpses of it through the mountains. Academics usually cart around a lot of paper with them – student essays, articles that they have promised to review, articles that friends have fobbed off on them that they have promised with faintly guilty consciences to get around to commenting on one of these days, monographs, notes, scraps, pleasure reading etc etc. We’re book people. The usual result is we’re laden down with overstuffed briefcases and bags every time we get on planes, exploding with dog eared manuscripts which mate with each other while we’re not looking, producing bizarre hybrids in which the pages from several different documents have gleefully miscegenated. Since purchasing my Iliad, I’ve gotten this under control. Everything that I get in text format, I PDF in a big friendly font, anddiwbpload to the Iliad before travelling. I’ve quite grown to enjoy the resulting feeling of serenity and order – everything I have to read _en route_ fits in a small, light reader that can be squeezed with a bit of pushing and shoving in my coat pocket.

The screen of the reader looks lovely. It uses digital ink rather than an LCD screen, so that you don’t get eyestrain – instead, the text reads clearly in natural light (or even bright sunlight) – it’s black (or, for illustrations) various shades of greyscale on an off-white-to-greyish background. Occasionally, there is some ghosting, but not enough to be more than a minor niggle. The screen is considerably larger than the Sony Reader, which means that it’s possible to read documents formatted for A4 size, although it sometimes isn’t as comfortable as it might be (while the manual suggests that 12 point font is perfectly sufficient, I find that tiring on the eyes, although doable in a pinch – I prefer, where possible, to format documents in 16 point). The Iliad has a decent battery life of around 8 hours activity in real world conditions; plenty for a transatlantic plane flight. Its controls (at least the controls for moving around in the text) aren’t as intuitive as they might be, but you get used to them pretty quickly.

What distinguishes it from the competition, such as it is, is that it allows you to take notes using a stylus. This is essential for academics – and in some ways makes it _better_ than a regular book for a certain, squeamish class of reader. Charlie Stross had a post a while back (I can’t find it now), which talked about how e-books simply weren’t satisfying as physical objects in the same way as regular books. But this cuts both ways – I, for one, _don’t like_ marking up physical books with marginalia etc, precisely because I like them as objects, but I’m very happy to scrawl all over e-books. With the exception of the few books that I really feel attached to, I’d be very happy to turn my academic library into an assortment of annotated PDF files (maybe that makes me a little weird). Furthermore I’m looking forward to the posthuman future where we can swap our notations, del.icio.us style, with our mates so as to grown vast thickets of marginalia, vigorous dissents, links and references to other authors etc around the original text. The stylus isn’t as good as a regular pen; it’s about as responsive as the average stylus on a PDA (although it is based on a different technology). But this is still plenty good enough for scrawled notes and queries, comments on student papers, etc, etc, etc. When you have finished scrawling, you can upload the annotated PDFs to your PC to print them out etc.

The downsides.

First – cost. It’s expensive, especially for people paying in dollars, as it isn’t available through dealers on this side of the Atlantic (I bought it some months ago, when the euro/dollar differential was much better than it is today). If/when we see similar technology at about half the price, it’ll be a lot more attractive. Half that price again might make for a genuine mass market.

Second – Internet access. It has built in 802.11g, but you can only use it for a few, quite limited purposes (primarily downloading new versions of the basic software). You can’t use it to access the Internet more generally. This seems to me to be a little crazy – there are lots of fun things that you could do with a cut-down browser etc that you simply can’t do. While, for example, you can use RSS feeds, you have to set up to download them on your computer using Mobipocket or similar, and then munge them over to the reader.

Third – user modifiability. There is some interesting homegrown software out there for the Iliad (its operating system is based on a cut-down version of Linux). But the manufacturers don’t seem to go especially out of their way to encourage people to come up with interesting mods. A useful comparison is with Neuros’s media recorders, which run on entirely modifiable open source software, and which have built up a thriving community of modders and home-brewers as a result. I suspect that the Iliad people want to preserve some control in the hope that they can then use distribution channels (see above under Internet access, dearth of) as an additional revenue stream. This seems unlikely to fly, especially given the competition from Amazon – better by far to differentiate your product in the marketplace by becoming the anti-Amazon (I suspect that most of the documents that people _actually_ want to read on a set-up like this aren’t going to be traditional e-books, but instead user generated documents, downloaded PDFs and the like – the easier you make it for people, say, to download material without restrictions from the WWW, the more likely it is that they will like your product).

Fourth. Some technical clunkiness around the edges of the software. This is clearly a product that isn’t designed for non-technically savvy users – the set up procedure in particular was frustrating, with glitches that suggested stupid design decisions (e.g. you _have_ to register and upgrade when you plug the reader into your computer, and are given an automatically generated password, which in my case included characters that aren’t available on the Iliad keyboard, requiring further password change etc etc etc).

These annoyances aside, I think that it’s a good product. More generally, I suspect that over the next decade or two, devices like this might help bring through a radical change in academic publishing and reading practices. Scott wrote a “piece”:http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/07/31/ricepress a few months ago talking about the problems of academic publishing, and linking to the “Ithaka report”:http://www.ithaka.org/strategic-services/university-publishing on new models of digital publishing in the academy. One of the problems with digital publishing of monographs is that very few people want to read anything longer than a short-ish article online, and the alternative, of printing out reams of 12 point Times New Roman A4 isn’t always that attractive either. Decent e-book readers, which allow you to mark up text, mean that you can read and annotate long texts easily without having to print them out. They’re an important underlying technology for whatever new ecology emerges. There’s a broad consensus among the digerati that e-book readers are a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist – but in the academy, not only does the problem exist, but it’s threatening to undermine the basic system of scholarly publishing. E-book readers aren’t a complete solution to this problem by any means, but I suspect that they will be an important part of that solution as it begins to emerge.