Edinburgh Napier University

  The marketplace has seen the launch over the past two years of a plethora of products that can now handle digitised books on mobile devices. One of the most prominent of these has been the Sony e-book reader, principally because of its availability through Waterstones, the UK bookseller, and other High Street retailers such as John Lewis. These e-book readers have generated a great deal of discussion but this has typically concentrated on their technical aspects rather aspects of use. In order to balance this deficit of debate, a group of postgraduate publishing students acted as guinea pigs using Sony e-book readers for both leisure and professional purposes. Students kept a diary and provided evaluative reports on their use of the readers. They made comparisons with their previous reading practices and read the same books in both print and digitised versions. This in turn provided the basis for this paper’s assessment of the value and future of e-book readers from a user perspective, particularly from a group of intensive readers of a generation familiar with a range of screen-based devices and functions.