Sony Data Discman: The First eBook Reader!

ebooks have been a natural progression of the media we consume going digital but in the early 90s they were unheard of until Sony got involved [Music] [Music] sometimes technology is ahead of its time and this is absolutely one of those occasions in the early 90s Sony introduced a new portable media device for reading books titles came in the form of cartridges three and a half or about nine centimeters square one might have expected it to use something like floppy disks for storage but rather Sony decided to leverage compact disk technology discs could hold about 200 megabytes which equated to hundreds of thousands of pages and since they were Optical the company ended up calling its product the data disk man I picked up three units but as we'll see they all have their share of problems the dd1ex appears to be the first model in the series launched in 1992 in the US but seemingly came out around 1990 in Japan the Box included two options for Batteries a dedicated rechargeable pack along with a caddy that accepted Six Double A's the unit itself featured a surprising number of buttons and connections the transport controls up front look innocuous enough but in addition to the headphone jack and power input on the left side there's a mini jack for composite video output on the right you didn't need to hook it up to a TV though because its clamshell design included a monochrome LCD this also hid the rest of the buttons a full qwerty keyboard plus d-pad and some function keys that entire panel lifted up to reveal the drive mechanism which resembled a mini compact disc player and that's because well it basically was the media inside the plastic caddies were really just three inch CDs I got a disc dropped in then installed some batteries in the caddy and snapped it onto the back of the player I pressed the power on button and could hear the unit start to read the disk but nothing ever appeared on screen the contrast control didn't have any effect though the screen's backlight did come on when I flipped it switch it looked like this unit wanted to work but there was clearly something wrong with the LCD itself given that it's over 30 years old it's perhaps not surprising that Parts have failed over time next up then was another data disk man I had imported from Japan the dd8 took a different form factor a handheld unit that vaguely resembled an oversized Game Boy it offered a similar selection of connectors and buttons but had a slot for the disc cartridge along the front edge thankfully it also ditched the custom battery pack in favor of a compartment that took four Double A's which I installed this dd8 sadly had the opposite problem as the dd1 the unit came to life and the screen worked fine but the drive wasn't able to read any disk I inserted it would spin them up but keep coming back with a read error my guess is that the laser is probably faulty which is starting to become a common occurrence in decades-old optical devices like this one two units down with one left to go could the third time be the charm thankfully it was this dd85 was the newest of the three and perhaps the most advanced it kept the clamshell design but was overall more compact than the others it also took double a batteries directly though it dropped the composite video output Jack the right side instead had the slot for the cartridges and when I put one in the unit woke up and read it automatically the LCD on the dd85 worked but wasn't perfect it had this visible wave to the display which I later found was due to a dirty contrast control but the bottom few rows of pixels were also dead neither of these kept me from exploring some of the software titles that came with the units I bought but I did find that they were honestly kind of boring that's because the majority of titles that were released generally seem to be reference materials things like travel guides language tools or dictionaries the interactive nature of Sony's electronic book platform did add some value in that the books offered search functionality and some apparently even had audio Snippets useful if you needed to hear how to pronounce something and along those lines while all three data diskman models I picked up had headphone Jacks the dd85 went a step further by including a speaker but as you might have gathered though this format never really took off for the most part it seems to have been due to cost the dd1ex sold for 500 U.S when it was new and software for it ran between 40 and 60 bucks in most cases that was much more expensive than the paper versions of the same books and the cost of Simply manufacturing the disks was high enough to deter Publishers from offering more casual titles like novels which usually sold for far less not that anyone would have really spent a ton of time reading on one of these devices anyway most data diskman models lacked a backlight the small screen made for cramped reading and the battery life of just three hours for the rechargeable pack and the dd1ex meant it wouldn't have lasted the duration of an entire flight there was one other trick these models could pull off Sony built in the ability to play audio CDs granted it only worked with the smaller three-inch discs that were mostly just used for singles and only the dd1ex could read discs that weren't in a caddy so it was otherwise kind of a pointless feature but it does make one wonder what these devices would have been like if they'd been designed to use full-size CDs instead [Music] in Japan the data disc man did see some popularity seemingly mostly as an electronic dictionary at least if the discs that came with the units I bought were to be believed my dd1 was a U.S domestic unit though and the single title that I found left in the drive ended up telling an interesting story on its own this one had black markers scribbled through its label but I could just barely make out that it was an encyclopedia I figured maybe a kid had done that out of boredom but when I tried the disc in my dd85 things got weird pretty quick instead of an encyclopedia the disc was full of religious sermons I ejected it and took a closer look to find that the disc inside the caddy was completely different Sony had largely given up on the data Discman by the late 90s due to poor sales and the hardware was being cleared from inventory at blowout prices while one normally needed to get licensing from Sony in order to produce titles a piece of Windows shareware fittingly called dd8 let you make your own apparently a small cottage industry had sprung up around creating books for the format and since the disks inside were otherwise normal mini CDs they could be pressed like any other disk but without a license from Sony the makers of these titles couldn't get new external caddies so they had to resort to either selling the discs on their own and instructing buyers to swap them which actually was pretty easy or picking up existing software and reusing the caddies and this seemed to carry on at least into the New Millennium as the disc I ended up with listed a date of 2000. for as successful as it's been as a company and all the Innovative Technologies it's developed Sony has still had its fair share of flops and failures clearly the data disk men is among them but that doesn't mean it was necessarily a bad product just one that missed the mark for what consumers were expecting or needed in the early 90s computers themselves were still catching on with the public let alone electronic books this changed in the coming Decades of course but the limitations of Technology at the time simply couldn't fulfill the promise that the data disc men tried to make [Music] thank you foreign

Channel: This Does Not Compute

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Length: 9min 38sec (578 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 07 2023