Sony Ebook Reader
I meant to post this a long time ago but never quite got around to it. This will probably be a trend for the next few posts as I try and get out at least one a week.
In January of 2006, there were two products at CES that caught my eye. At the time, I was sure that the sony reader (wikipedia) would make it out before the series 3 tivo, but that was not the case and the tivo is now sitting happily in my entertainment center. After a couple of delays, the Sony Reader made it out in time for xmas and I’ve had one for a little less than a year now, during which there haven’t been any hardware updates other than the occasional firmware. If you want to stop reading here, the main takeaway is that I love it and think that it is one of the most useful gadgets since the ipod nano.
The Pros
- The screen is eInk and is really easy on the eyes. It looks like the output from a dot-matrix printer on plastic. You really have to see one in person to get a good idea of how it looks.
- Because the screen doesn’t need power to keep an image, the battery life on it is really nice. On a trip to mexico for a week, I read 3 books and used half a charge.
- Sony actually built a device that will also take SD cards. In a similar show of openness, RTF is really well supported as a document type and is what I use since it supports reflowing of the document as you change the font size.
- I can throw it in my bag and know that I always have at least one book with me that I want to read. I currently have something like the top 30 books that I want to read next on it.
- The sony ebook store is actually pretty good. There’s been some titles that I can’t find, but I usually have so many books that I could be reading that it isn’t an issue. For example, recently I bought and read Patriot Acts only a couple of weeks after it came out in hardcover.
- Since PDF doesn’t reflow, it’s hard to get PDF looking good on the device unless you are constructing the PDF yourself for the screen size. I had some programming books that I’d bought in PDF that were almost unreadable since they were formatted for letter size paper.
The Cons
- The screen could be a little bigger. Mostly, I like that the device is pretty small, but a little extra screen real estate could go a long way.
- You’re stuck with whatever books you can either find unDRMed (I recommend Baen’s online bookstore) or whatever you can find on the sony store since the hardware and software don’t support the same format that Amazon uses.
- The support software (the iTunes like app for ebooks) is pretty crappy. You have a lot of control over what gets onto the reader, but not a lot of ability to have it do things for you automatically (like transfer books after you import or buy them). There’s a lot of places where they should have just copied iTunes but either couldn’t or didn’t. The software on the reader is pretty straightforward. The only big issue is trying to categorize books if you want to throw a large library on a memory card.
It sounds like pretty soon Amazon will come out with something that will also be wifi enabled but if you travel and read a lot (or just don’t want to lug around a bunch of books), the reader is not too bad for $280.
