e-books in the 1990s - Sony's Data Discman

looking back it feels like there was a point in the 1980s where I couldn't go for a couple of weeks watching television without seeing somebody say something like this you may be surprised to hear that in my pocket I've got all the volumes of the current version of the Encyclopedia Britannica no it's not a magic trick it's a new technology called compact disc read-only memory or cd-rom for short it might look like the compact disc you may have at home in your hi-fi or in your discman portable player but this holds data how much data well enough to hold the equivalent of 450 of these that's sufficient to hold all the works of Shakespeare and all the books you see behind me here I heard about this library on a disk thing so many times it started to sound like something that I might actually want yeah for lived on a disc kinda sounds cool well Sony definitely thought so anyway and they took it a stage further not only did they put books on discs but they made it portable so you could carry around a library in your pocket if your pocket was big enough let's have a look at the Sony data discman the first date to disk man ebook reader the Sony DD one was launched in Japan in the middle of 1990 it was a little over a year later at the end of 1991 when the first model made its way to the US and that was the DD 1px that was a slight upgrade of the original version because it had a larger screen and it also added a backlight onto that screen as well this new electronic book reader was featured in Popular Mechanics January 1992 issue although that magazine went on sale on the 15th of December 91 and will have gone to press a couple of weeks before then so it looks likely that the DD 1e X actually made its way to market just before Christmas 1991 now I've got one of those USD d1e X models here and at the time that were selling this box they were bundling it with electronic books apparently worth two hundred and twenty-nine dollars in total those are Compton's concise encyclopedia the Wellness encyclopedia and passports world travel translator now about a year or so later when it was lodged in the UK those book titles they're definitely not worth two hundred and twenty-nine dollars the ones we got here were hair ups multilingual dictionary purchase ins encyclopedic dictionary and the Thomson electronic directory yes that's a phone book okay well moving on let's have a look at the player itself and see exactly how it works and what it can do well to start with it's a portable device you can run it on six double-a batteries or of course power it from an AC power adapter it reads three-inch optical disks that are in caddies which can contain up to a hundred thousand pages of text or 32 thousand graphic images although those pages of text are just ten lines by 30 characters on that 3.4 inch display now as far as the graphics resolution well to find that out I'm gonna have to look in this booklet here this is something that you would have picked up in a shop just to show you what it would look like that's an actual sized model and it says here that that resolution is 256 by 256 double-a batteries but you could replace that with the rechargeable battery cell it was included inside the box and according to the specs you got six hours out of six double A batteries or five with the bat lights on and the rechargeable cell lasted a maximum of two and a half or two with a bat lights on you can also see some other specs on the screen including the dimensions and the weight now as is covered with these black rubberized coated electronics from the early 90s the coating has started to break down it's gone really sticky it's pretty unpleasant to hold but I'll show you around it on the left-hand side that's where your power goes in we've got the contrast for the screen stereo headphone output volume control for the headphones controls for the CD player a whole switch to stop it being activated when you don't want it to be and a video output on this side we've got the cable for that as well if you look on the bottom you can see it can be switched between ntsc or so this is a worldwide devices don't region coding or anything like that on these it was designed to be easy to use by anyone without any computer experience required so we've got a cursor control and then a large yes button with a smaller no beside it above there is a standard QWERTY layout which is missing a spacebar you'd use the right arrow to insert a space and then above there we've got function keys which relate to the things that are shown on the screen and that screen despite being larger than the original Japanese model is still very small to try read a book on however it is backlit so I suppose that's something now the discs themselves going beneath the keyboard here but what titles could you get for this well let's have a look through this spring 1992 catalogue now these were all the titles are available at these points and it looks like there's something here for everyone it covers education entertainment literature reference sports travel and leisure but when you actually look at the titles are available under each of those subheadings there are a very few in there that actually jump out at you as being something that you'd really want to buy I remember this product turning up in the stores in the early 90s and I excitedly picked up one of those brochures I showed you before there how the actual size model inside and I was imagining this as being like an updated Gameboy I know it's very naive but I was thinking imagine the adventure games you could play on this with a cd-rom drive in the bottom but looking through this catalog the most interesting thing I could find in here that I would have wanted to buy would have been Roger Ebert's movie home companion for 1991 a common misconception about the data discman is that you couldn't get normal books on it you could get these reference titles encyclopedias dictionaries databases that kind of thing but if you wanted a novel for example they didn't sell those well they did they were in these library of the future discs there were three of these issued and they included up to a hundred and fifty famous works of literature so for example you could have sat down and read Moby Dick on your small liquid crystal display if you'd got enough batteries that is so how much did these discs cost well they varied between thirty and fifty dollars as a whole although there are a couple of standout ones there and bear in mind these are 1992 prices we've got a three language dictionary at the top they're for $80 and then we've got $130 title down here the Compton's concise encyclopedia and if you remember that was the one that was included bundled inside the box I got from the US so at one point that had been available separately and no doubt they added it into the box later in an attempt to make the product more attractive to the public and add some perceived value to it there's one big problem with this whole library on a disk idea and it's how does anyone get paid I mean yeah you could just release a one book on a disk but a paperback book would be cheaper than this and it isn't really doing the former any justice it's almost empty so what about perhaps putting the entire works of a particular author on a disk say all the Stephen King books well what would you charge for all those it would anyone be prepared to pay for it and then what about the people that don't really want all the books just want a selection of them and then try getting the author on board as well so you can see why they ended up more with reference books and eBooks outs of the public domain so you could just put a load of Shakespeare or old books on one of these and then of course you're looking at that on the shelf thinking well why don't I read a lot of old books on a on a modern format a little tiny screen the whole idea just doesn't really work home now ideally I'd love to be able to demonstrate one of these discs using the built-in LCD but fortunately both the machines are I've got the LCDs are dead but machines themselves are still alive I can imagine loads of people just threw these away as a result of that because it's a common problem however I'm going to be able to demonstrate the distt here still because I'll use the video output on here and I'll plug that into the television upload the audio out from the other side as well so whilst we can't look at it on the machine itself we'd be able to see it on the television in the early nineties when the data discman came out cd-rom was really starting to explode in popularity had been on the scene for quite a few years I mean the ADC pc engine CD ROM attachment came out in 1988 in Japan but by this point in 92 not many people would have a cd-rom drive in their computers I remember I got my first one for my PC in 1993 when I bought day of the tentacle for it so that's how come I can date it to that point and I remember even then I was still pretty much an early adopter I didn't know anyone else who had a cd-rom drive at home I'd imagine the kind of people who bought this product when it first came at the end of 91 or beginning of 92 would really have been early adopters as well they would have been the kind of people that would be happy to spend $600 plus the cost of the disks on a device like this I don't know what this they would have bought that they would have considered would be worth spending that amount of money on but I know I would have been a little bit disappointed by this in fact I I know I was because I remember trying these out in the stores that I'm after being quite excited about the idea as soon as I actually got to use one it was really quite underwhelming just looking through pages with a small amount of text on them and searching for things was the kind of thing that wore thin very quickly and I remember just walking away from the display for this thing thinking well yeah I don't actually want one after all especially not at that price I wonder if the people who bought the early ones were happy with their purchases you'll notice that it comes up with the responses quite quickly and that's because as soon just start typing in your search it's starting to look for it when you press that first character that's when the disc spins up and as you add additional characters into your search term its narrowing it down so that by the time you press that yes key to enter the search field it's already got the response ready for you so let's try one of these UK discs out now just for fun let's have a look at the phone book well it's a business directory it's a rival to the Yellow Pages the Thomson directory you can see we've got a number of different regions here they called it the Thomson local but of course this is a National disc because they don't know who's going to be buying the discs where you are in the country so they had to put all the different versions on and of course the ad space to spare so let me search for something in London on this I'll look for Tarot records I know would have been around at the point that this disc was issued in the early 90s we've got four different Tarot record stores there and you can see that's the one in Piccadilly Circus as well as the other three that follow it on let's try something else let's have a look at another music store will try the Virgin Megastore on Oxford Street and okay so it's not on this page but you can see virgin master tronic at the bottom there I'll just go down a line and yes there it is so we'll just have a look and there you go while we're on the subject of music let's try some of these CDs because it can play mini CDs the 3 inch 8 centimeter CDs that were issued with singles on for a while they weren't very popular over in the West but they did meet with more popularity of course over in Japan and they're just popping the middle here they don't click in place and you can just play them using the controls on the front these CD singles could hold up to 24 minutes worth of audio or in data terms about 210 megabytes but I think at the point when this player came out they provide a little bit less capacity than that probably between 180 and 200 megabytes in total as a replacement for a Walkman goes it really isn't that much use because it can't play a full size CD albums just those singles but we've seen it playing those and we've seen some text displayed on the screen one thing we haven't looked at though is the graphic so let's have a look at that now remember these are 256 by 256 are on there with this graphic search it just pages through them one after the other one thing I should do here is adjust the aspect ratio to 4/3 so that you can see what it would have looked like when it was displayed on the screen rather than being stretched out to fill this TV screen so you can page through the graphics one at a time you can see they're quite rudimentary they would have appeared though in the article so you get an hour school you'd get down to the thing it says see this picture you press right arrow and then the picture would have come up they'll look a lot better on this TV screen and they would have done on the LCD out of the titles I've got the Compton's concise encyclopedia definitely seems to be one of the better ones of course that was $130 title it doesn't know the answer to everything but when it comes to graphics it certainly makes better use out of them than any of the others you can still use that graphical search facility where you just page through the one at a time but they've added in something extra in here that once you're in a graphic you can then go from that graphic to the article that it should be related to by positioning your cursor at different points on the screen it's a bit of a hack around the system in a way but it works quite well so you get your graphic on the screen that you're interested in and then you move the cursor over to the right on side and press yes and then that takes you into the article associated with that image of course Compton's encyclopedia is a good encyclopedia and the information that's in there is definitely worth reading it's just accessing it using this device can prove to be tricky at times for example if I search for compact discs it brings back no results but if I just search for the word compact on its own it brings back one result which just happens to be compact discs now once you get into the article the information that's in there is detailed and comprehensive of course it's spread over many pages you've got to scroll through it nine lines at a time which is one of the disadvantages of this form a would be easier to read it in a book but then again the book would be a much bigger thing to carry around however searching for the information that you want on one of these ebooks is a frustrating experience perhaps in a way to compensate for this each disk is accompanied by quite a thick manual that has a lot of additional information in there and according to the instruction booklet they want you to take your manual along with your electronic books that you can understand how to access the information in the electronic book and it amuses me that idea the fact you'd have to take a lot of paper books that you could then use your electronic one of course you could get by without it other useful bits of information in the manual include you shouldn't do a flying elbow drop on the top of the lid and additionally you can take out the disk from the caddy if you need to clean it there are clear markings on each caddy as to which corner you open and to do that you just push in a plastic tab and the bottom hinges at the other corner when you remove the disks you can see it's got all the information printed on there I suppose that means you can't mix it up with any others and put it back in the wrong caddy and you might be wondering what would happen if you were to put one of these disks into a computer well I'll show you if you put it into a cd-rom drive of course it will read it but you can't actually access the information that's on there properly without having an appropriate piece of software to read those databases but that software did exist back in 1992 at least when Sony sold the DD dr1 this is an external drive which attaches up to a computer via rs-232 and would enable you to read the data discman ebooks on a PC now whilst are being unable to find the reader software that would have accompanied that drive you can still get hold of some unofficial authoring software that would enable you to create your own day two disc bound discs and once you've got them in the format the data discman can read of course you just burned them to an 8 centimeter CD the web address for that software is at the bottom right of the screen there oh and if you're interested you can see how the Caddy is opened up inside the machine here there's an arm with a roller on their hand that locates inside a notch on the door of the Caddy and as you push it down the door then is slid to one side and imagine that's very similar to have a three and a half inch floppy opens up it's just a little bit easier to see here now this is something that not many people will have seen before the DDP want the printer for the data discman the way this works is you plug it into a power supply you plug the video out from the DD 1e X into the side of here and you're just the contrast because what it's doing is printing the video output the image that would display on your TV screen so the mirror of the image that would display on the LCD or the discman itself and it puts it onto this thermal paper now unfortunately my device is not fully functional well it's hardly functional it just spits out it's nonsense but that piece of text they're all images it is on this case should have look like the image that you see on the TV screen there just think that isn't really an awful lot of you so you're printing effectively just a tiny amount of text it's not a full article it would be that that you see there well you can imagine that's the kind of thing you could just scribble down on a pad with a pen and anyone have to plug a printer into a wall power supply it's a really unusual object because I just don't think they solve any of these because it's pretty useless looking at the serial number on the bottom it looks like this is the 90th one that they made and I don't know if they made very many more than that oh and just in case you were wondering I did try printing both NTSC and PAL video outputs he didn't work with either because it is just broke and unfortunately in fact just shortly after filming that segment it stopped working entirely I don't know if this title caught your eye earlier on when we were looking through that catalog but it certainly caught mine back in the early 90s adventure 101 it seems to indicate that it's some sort of adventure game and if that's the case if it is a game it's the only game that was released on this former in the West it's been a mystery for me for the last 25 years what this actually is well I managed to get hold of one recently so I can now finally find out so let's have a look now it took me a couple of years of searching to find this title and it's very rare to find any of these electronic books in their box sealed more offer than that it's just the disk that's offered on its own so it's very happy to get hold of this and I've got to say yes it is a game although not the kind of game that I was expecting I always think he was going to be like a text adventure in the sense of like pinky up use key in door go north that kind of thing instead it small I could choose your own adventure book now the way those worked is that you'd read a long passage of text and then occasionally you'd be given a choice whether to go north or south for example and depending upon which one you chose you flicked to a particular page in the book well this works the same way you get various choices popping up every down and for example here I've chosen to look around the living room and then it goes on to that section of text and there's also quite a lot of illustrations in here which I think are particularly well done given the severe limitations of this format now when you're going through the text you can go down a line at a time or more likely you press the right arrow to go a page at a time but there's an awful lot of text to go through before you then get to the next choice of jumps of some of the more interesting sections here for example on this one I've got to choose whether I seek help in the castle follow the footprints or wait and see what happens so I choose the third one and the disk jumps to the appropriate section of the book it's quite a humorous title at times they'll throw things up like this where they give you two choices that are identical so it doesn't matter which one you pick and then it comes up to tell you that they have to do that because they couldn't think of any other way of getting you to go and choose the right option now there's no way of saving your progress on the data discman you can't fold over the corner of the page so instead what they've done is they've got this keyword system notice at the top of the screen there it says follow five well that is the keyword for that particular chapter of the book so then if I do a word search for that and put follow five in there it will take me straight back to that section so they've managed to work around the limitations of the format however despite all the clever ideas and hard work that have got into this add these really quite good illustrations considering the resolution and format of the screen I've got to say that it isn't something that couldn't have been done better in the form of a paperback book the illustrations will be clearer you'd have more text per page and it wouldn't have cost you $40 oh and you won't have to worry about your batteries running out now what did people think of the data discman when it came out in the early nineties well they weren't all that impressed in the UK came out November 92 so about a year after the us date and the excellent UK journalist Barry Fox did an article about it for New Scientist and he said it was a terrible lost opportunity he said the screen was completely unusable even with the backlight switched on it smeared terribly had poor contrast and he said it was best to watch it on a TV screen unfortunately I can't demonstrate what the screen was like or the device itself and he didn't like the search functions the way that things didn't come up that he was looking for as I experienced earlier on and he said that whilst it had sold well in Japan it had already flopped in the US and he thought it would flop in Europe too and he was back on it wasn't long before the data discman disappeared from the stores Sony did continue to market and sell the product though although they aimed it more at professionals people like doctors who might need a database of medical information on a disc it wasn't really aimed at the general public anymore and people largely forgot about it meanwhile over in Japan it was a completely different story I've managed to obtain this brochure from 1998 and if we flick through here we can see there are a lot of new disk Mar models been introduced since people forgot about it in the West some of these are very similar to one another but they'll come with different books for example an encyclopedia or a language course but you can see in the back here there's a lot more titles now they seem to be aimed around the same area as the ones we saw before databases of reference books and things but for some reason this product seems to have appealed to people in Japan in a way that it didn't in the West the rear page of this catalog is the most revealing because it shows data discs band's fortunes outside of Japan these the titles you could get that weren't Japanese ones 89 ninety-eight and they include Roger Ebert's movie Home Companion 1991 edition USA Today 1992 91 in the most recent one I could find their michelin european guide 1993 so it just shows that this product pretty much died off elsewhere around about 1993 but carried on regardless over in Japan now I've got two of the later machines here this one I don't think Ashley came from Japan this would have been used in some kind of English language course and you can tell looking at the keyboard that it wasn't a Japanese model because there are no Japanese characters on there but it's very similar to the other machine it does have a built-in speaker so you'll be able to hear phrases and words being spoken on this we've got a slide loading slot on here which means if you want to play your 8 centimeter CDs you'll have to first put them in a caddy for this one it's a very nice machine it's got a decent sized screen on it it's very light weights it feels a little bit hollow perhaps but other than that pretty good now this one there's a little bit more substantial this one says data and news and the reason for that is because it's got this aerial on the back which would pick up data over the FM frequencies you can see inside here the layout is very similar we've got some additional buttons on the back which enable you to tune into those FM broadcasts you can just use this as a radio in Japan at least to use the lower parts of the frequency range that reduce over in the West I can't pick very much up on it over here and of course I can't pick any of those dates of broadcasts from 1998 but I can show you from the catalogue here the kind of things it would pick up at a time and it's a kind of tele text type service you pick up things like news weather sports scores that kind of stuff now so that we can see one of these machines in action I'll unwrap this new old stock Roger Ebert's movie Home Companion from 1991 and slot the disc into the side of the machine this will be the first time I've seen one of these ebooks being used on the built-in display and it looks nice and clear here I suspect though this screen will be a lot better than the one that will have been used on that first device putting lethal weapon in brings up two results at this point and I'm happy to say that it appears that Roger ever enjoyed lethal weapon as much as I did now one problem we hit upon earlier on with that phone book is as soon as one of these things is published it's out of date this is the 1991 edition so whatever you search for has been frozen in time at that point now you got to remember that this disk was still on sale in Japan in 1990 a so if you search for Titanic which was out there of course he doesn't appear he comes up with Time Bandits and that is one of the problems of these fixed databases now I want to show you this model here this is the DDS 35 the very last data discman to come out and it came out in the year 2000 and just look at the size of the screen on this one it's a lot larger than the screens on the earlier devices and really nice and clear as well this is really about as neat as you could make a data discman given the limitations of the physical disk format which by the way have been hidden away underneath the keyboard just like in the original DD 1 and a DD 1 DX now over the years there were a number of different disk formats that were used in these devices a Japanese one use the letters EB on there when it made its way to the US they used EBG now you think that maybe that meant the American one would have graphics and the Japanese one didn't it was just text but I believe those two are the same it's just they use different letters depending upon where the device came from however later on they came out with EB X a which was an update to the format which had a higher resolution images and also sounds that were built in that could be played in the book itself rather than just offer CD and then there was a Chinese version and then there was s eb x a in 1998 that was the last version and while I haven't found a comprehensive list of what additional features came along with SE b XA i can see here that it mentions character compression and color photography yes there was a color data discman it came with a disc that contained all 26 volumes of the Japan encyclopedia and it was announced at the end of 1999 and launched at the beginning of the year 2000 now the model I've got the s 35 despite it not having a color screen came out after that model in April 2000 oh this one has a screen with a resolution of 320 by 200 40 with 16 gray scales and it's also got a backlight which you can activate if you want and the battery life for this is a big improvement over those original models it runs on just two doublea's and it will last for 10 hours unfortunately I don't have any se bxa discs that I can demonstrate to you the best I've got is this eb x a1 so i'll show you some of its multimedia capabilities this disc which seems to be based on a Japanese game show I'm sure some views will get in touch and tell me exactly what this is but they've managed to somehow create a little bit of a game here it's very limited and they're really pushing up against their edge use of this technology because the data discman couldn't remember scores or where you got up to or any of that kind of stuff but instead what they've got here is a branching structure with a lot of graphics that are displayed one after the other and it gives the impression that it's a game but really what you're doing is flicking through the pages of a book which are branching off in various different directions at different points and I've got the foggiest idea what's going on but you can see the kind of things that were possible on this format so we'll leave it there because we've looked at the last Sony data discman that came out in the year 2000 and we've gone all the way back to the first one that came out in Japan in 1990 and that was approximately 17 years before Amazon came out with their Kindle history has shown that this was the wrong way to go about an electronic book although of course they were using the technology of the time it's just they were a little bit too early for the idea lates of products like the Kindle got it right with the e ink display and the online store we could buy one book at a time live for a sensible amounts of money this ended up in the database and the encyclopedia and the reference guide type of area and of course even then that was taken over by smartphones after all with something like this you have to plan what discs you're taking along with you what things might I want to reference today and then take all those discs with you in your pocket so now it seems a little bit ludicrous but you know it certainly was an interesting product and as ever with Sony one thing leads to another this wasn't just a complete waste of time as we saw it was on the market for quite a while in Japan and why not say one thing leads to another in Saudia got so many different divisions coming up with different products it means that if something doesn't really work out in one area they can still incorporate that technology into something else so for example the DD one when it came out in 1990 while it might not have eventually set the world on fire what it did do it got Sony into producing CD ROMs quite early in the format's life they then of course carried on producing CD ROMs and eventually came out with the PlayStation ok so perhaps it's a bit of a stretch to say the PlayStation might never have come out if the data discman hadn't existed but how about this one the dds 1000 the color model that came out at the beginning of 2000 surely a small portable battery-powered color screen device that reads optical discs some of that DNA the research that went into that must have found its way into the PlayStation Portable it came out a few years later so I wouldn't say it was a complete failure it was just a perfect example really of the fact that just because you can make a product and technology has made it possible he might not necessarily be the thing that people really want after all so that's it for the moment as always thanks for watching [Music] [Music] [Music] you actually I think you'll find at the first consumer ebook reader was a Bible that was sold by Franklin in 1989 okay first whenever you start a sentence with the word actually it means that no one's going to listen to anything that you say after that and second yes I can search Wikipedia on my computer to repeating things you've just looked up online doesn't make you clever it just means that you could use a search box something that very few people are going to be impressed by actually huh you just use the word actually I used it at the end of the sentence by then it's too late for anyone to switch off oh well perhaps I already knew all about ebooks I was just looking on Wikipedia to double check my facts so you will looking on Wikipedia then you do know that it's not always accurate actually I think you'll find that because it's on the Internet that means it's impossible for it to be wrong but aren't you on the Internet as well yeah no further questions the prosecution rests their case I could see why you're not in these outros very much anymore your character is just to me whereas everybody loves me no apparently it's because my voice is too difficult to do and it's slightly annoying as well [Music]

Channel: Techmoan

Views: 626,427

Keywords: Techmoan, 4K, DD-1, DD1, Data Discman, Discman, E-book, Electronic Book, First, ebook, Kindle, Reader, DD1-EX, DD-S35, DD-MR10, DD-57, Digital Book, Sony, 1990, 1990s, Technology, Retro, Retro-Tech, Tech, old, History, ebook reader, e-reader, vintage tech, gadget, retro tech, retrotech

Id: MXXiRJAKC4w

Length: 34min 33sec (2073 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 03 2018