Sony CD eBook Reader (Data Discman DD-S30SP)

Taking a break from Xenon light sources, today I’m going to take a brief look at an eBook reader I picked up in a local junk shop. These are similar to the electronic eBooks discussed a while back by Techmoan.

The unit I have dates from the year 2000 and feels like a midpoint in the evolution of these devices. While earlier devices seem a little bit more like general eBook platforms this one feels much closer to the modern “electronic dictionary”. Electronic dictionaries are still pretty popular in Japan, and you can find a large number of devices mostly from Casio and Sharp.

Modern electronic dictionaries often come with a number of “value added” features, such as eBook readers, music players, and video guides. And in many ways this “eBook Reader” feels like a very similar product. It came with a CD containing a basic Japanese and Japanese-English dictionary, and I suspect this is what most users would have used it for.

At the time, flash memory would have been prohibitively expensive which kind of makes this awkward looking product make sense.

Opening it up, there’s a fairly traditional CD player mechanism which has been crammed into the tiny case. It only takes caddied 8 inch CDs, which helps keep the overall unit small:

As Techmoan notes, these devices were briefly marketed outside Japan, but overall electronic dictionaries never gained popularity overseas. Sony continued to release electronic dictionaries for some time, with more recent flash based models fairly closely resembling this one. But seem to have dropped the product line completely now.

Sharp and Casio have kept going however, and no doubt some of the datasets developed for the Discman platform live on in these devices.