I am fond of books just as much as gadgets. Furthermore, I like traveling light just as much as I hate to commute idly. It was no question sooner or later I’ll have an ebook reader in my pocket.
With the Sony PRS-505 ebook reader hitting the market I instantly knew I need one. Now that I hold it in my hands, it’s love at first sight. I’d say with chewing on this nicety, my hunger for useful gadgets is cured for a while.
Apart from the sleek design, the most important things securing my choice were the courtesy of Sony to include an SD card slot, and the USB Mass Storage interface, as these two features ensured that the reader can be extended for less (not that the 200MB internal flash can’t hold enough books for many commutes), and will communicate seamlessly with a Linux PC.
This eInk display technology is a salvation for the eyes of many, including myself. An anti-glare, daylight readable, not background-lit, high contrast, 8 grey levels display makes my LCD-strained eyes very happy.
As I was planning to use this device to read not just books but also to keep reference manuals and tutorials at hand, I was curious about the ebook formats it supports. So the first thing I did was playing around with various document formats. The rest of this post is dedicated to this topic.
Text files are a developer’s friend. Fortunately, these are laid out quite fine by the reader. The TXT files appear in the booklist with name of the file as the book title, and the file creation date as the book author. The reader provides 3 zoom levels, with 30, 25, and 20 lines of text per page displayed in portrait mode, or 15 + 2, 12 + 2, and 10 + 1 overlapping lines per (half) page in landscape mode. The font used to render txt documents appears to be Bitstream’s Dutch 801 Roman BT. It seems ISO-8859-1 is assumed being the character encoding of text files.
When an ebook gets opened the first time, the reader works for a couple of seconds to paginate the contents, however, the results get cached, so this only slows things down once per ebook (per zoom level used).
RTF documents add the features of multiple font faces and font decoration to be used. Also, it is the document title and author that gets displayed in the booklist, so these need to be set up properly for easier lookup.
The next widespread format supported is PDF, though it has some issues. The reader’s screen size is too small to display an A4 or a Letter size PDF in a readable way. You may use the landscape function, which shows the top or the bottom half of the page. This, in together with the zoom function results in a readable half-page (without the margins), but the zoom level resets to default when turning page. Furthermore, special fonts/charsets don’t always render properly, and password protected PDFs don’t even show up in the booklist.
On the positive side, internal links in PDFs can be used to navigate within the document. Ah, and I’ve found quite a few reader-optimized ebook titles in PDF format at Feedbooks.com.
Documents in Sony’s proprietary ebook format, BBeB, obviously work the most seamless, providing three zoom levels, where the number of lines displayed depends on the font size settings of the ebook too. However, it’s hard to find anything useful in this format outside the CONNECT eBooks universe. I’m planning to write about tools for creating BBeB documents in a later post.
Concerning pictures (jpeg, png and gif formats), the PRS-505 is littlesomewhat slow on rendering, and with the very limited colorspace of 8 gray levels, the PRS505 is not likely to be used as my primary electronic photo album. However, it is good enough to enjoy my favorite comics, what more, probably an ideal device to share the greatest cartoons of savage chickens with my friends in the offline universe.
Finally, regarding the MP3 playing capabilities, while it is certainly a gimme feature to allow listening and reading at the same time, I don’t yet consider it a big thing, but time will tell whether I’ll use this ebook as a walkman too. For now, I haven’t even tried this feature.All in all, it is a charm to hold and read on. It is definitely worth all the 300 bucks of its introductory price tag.
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Update: Doug (of Savage Chickens fame) liked this chicken-in-ebook illustration, and wrote a line about it on his behind the scenes section.
I am thinking of getting the Sony PRS 505 but I am concerned about getting enough content. As a non-US resident will I be able to purchase ebooks from CONNECT? Are there any other places that I can get ebooks that will work with the device seamlessly without going through a lot of conversion? Grateful for your advice.
Adapt A4/letter pdf for your Sony Reader PRS500/PRS505
http://www.pdfcropper.com
I was determined with all my might not to appreciate with ebooks – despite the fact that my novels are selling far better in ebook form than hard copy.
However, I succumbed in time and bought a Sony PRS-500 (the predecessor to this model) and fell in love. On a recent trip to the US (I’m from the UK), the 500 was an real airport delay and in-flight tedium assuager.
I currently have about 150 e-books inside it, and they’re not even scratching the sides yet. However, an indispensble bit of software, I find, is “lit2lrf”, which converts Microsoft Reader’s “LIT” format to the Sony Reader’s “LRF” version. You can get hundreds of ebooks in LIT format from sites like Fictionwise.com.
It won’t work on protected DRM (digital rights management) ebooks, but that still leaves plenty.
Oh, and having seen all the rave reviews, I’ve ordered a PRS-505, and I can’t wait for it to arrive!
I saw one of these in Waterstones and was instantly charmed. What I don’t think really comes over in the reviews above is just how thin it is. It’s tiny! Much less thick than a normal book (but about the same screen size). The display was very crisp and clear and I found the controls intuitive and easy to use. The aluminium finish was reassuringly solid.
However, a bit more research showed it wasn’t what I wanted. I wasn’t keen on paying for any ebooks – I’d prefer to use it for work to prevent carting around masses of various papers. Could I view them as pdfs on an eBook viewer, I wondered… However, I’ve recently been told that under the Data Protection Act, I’ll need to password protect them. And in answer to Paul’s question a couple of days ago, NO, you can’t view password-protected pdfs on this reader. See another review at: http://www.forwhatitworths.com/posts/2007/11/the-sony-prs505-love-at-first-sight/
How about the competition? This is what an evening’s surfing revealed:
(Incidentally, when comparing weights, an average paperback is said to weigh about 320g)
The iLiad Reader is the fullest-spec’d with a tablet built in, handwriting software, WiFi etc. However, it’s also the heaviest (389g – but still not at all bad) and the most expensive (£429). At that price you could buy a decent laptop instead. But if any eBook reader could open password-protected pdfs it would probably be this one – not that I’ve tried. Maybe someone could ask them.
http://www.iliadreader.co.uk/
The BeBook is actually lighter than the Sony (220g, vs 250g) and only a tiny bit more expensive (£229), although I’m a bit suspicious since this is apparently a dutch website. If anybody has got hold of one, please let me know.
I particularly admired the chutzpah of BeBook for mounting 20,000 free book pdfs directly on their website! – Although they say they will also have a wider choice in a DRM’d format called Mobipocket soon. They also promise offers similar to the iLiad including WiFi, stylus, etc at some point in the future. Until then, presumably you can’t open password-protected PDFs… again, maybe somebody could ask them.
http://mybebook.com/index.html
Bear in mind though that all these eBook readers are more expensive than the tiniest 7″ laptops like the Asus EEE, which costs only £149 at PC World! This gives you a WiFi and a full software suite including email, web, OpenOffice and a PDF reader – so you could just as well read eBook PDFs on that. However, even the tiniest Asus is much heavier than any of the eBook readers at about 920g – so almost three iLiads or four Sonys or BeBooks! Suddenly my bag wouldn’t be so light any more after all. And battery life is a relatively puny 3 hours.
So where to go next?? It seems clear that if you need to annotate and enter data in, on cost grounds you can barely justify the iLiad – an Asus or similar sub-notebook might be better. I wish the iLiad was much cheaper; then it would be a non-brainer.
All of the eBook readers seem to have that magic quality of lightness though which makes even the Asus look distinctly weighty.
I can’t really stomach spending over £400 on an eBook reader so that leaves the Sony and the BeBook. The BeBook really charmed me with its website aggressively pushing so many free books at me! They’ll even give you a free unit if you get ten friends to buy one themselves. But why buy one now when in their own blurb they say there is an enhanced version coming out imminently?
The Sony is the only eBook reader that you could walk in off the high street and buy in the U.K with a proper warranty, I would wager. But it will tie you up in DRM knots if you let it, it seems. I guess Sony/Waterstones wants to make their money on the ebooks you buy whereas the other two are trying to earn a crust on actual device sales.
Sheesh…. I just don’t know. I really want to open password-protected PDFs, like Paul. And I want a light, light bag. I wish somebody would just give me an iLiad, or maybe if they cost only £200… and so the angst continues….!
There is an online converter
http://www.lib2go.com