A few weeks ago, I was thinking of getting a handheld eBook reader, and I saw a couple of Sony models owned by colleagues at work.
The PRS 505 is Sony’s early (first?) effort, but it was, well, old and superseded by a newer one. The PRS 600 is one of the newer ones, similar form factor but had a touch screen and I found this made it less contrasty and quite a bit shiny. Its extra features (dictionary, note pad, card reader) all sounded appealing, but you can’t get away from the shiny, low contrast display.
So I plumbed for the PRS 300.
This is high contrast, low shine like the 505, but in a smaller form factor. It also has none of the bells and whistles, but is it any good as a reading device?
Well, yes. It is.
I’ve now read two Iain M Banks novels, purchased from Waterstones online store. Immediately prior to this, I read another of Bank’s novels in paper form and I can honestly say that the eBook form is absolutely fine. If anything, less eye strain, and easier to handle.
I’ve also tried reading PDFs, but this is less satisfactory as the screen is a bit too small for the pre-formatted pages and reflowing with a larger type doesn’t work well.
Battery wise, it’s showing three out of four bars full after the two books plus lots of fiddling with PDFs, so pretty damn good.
The only real criticism I have is with the software used to move books from computer to device.
The Sony software doesn’t work 100% well on the Mac with Snow Leopard (it’s written in Flex/AIR, I think, so should be cross platform), but it really doesn’t work well with DRMed books as the necessary connection to Adobe Reader doesn’t work as expected.
I can live with this as I just do the connection in XP/VMWare, but the real pain is the total lack of useful information from Sony support, who seem to have a different story each time you call/email them.
Money-wise, eBooks from Waterstones are similar price or maybe a bit cheaper than the paper equivalents. This is good. There are also thousands of free books out there. Even better.
So all in all, a good buy and I definitely think I’ll be reading books in ‘e’ form where possible from now on.
3 Responses to “Reader of Books”
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cool, ive had an iliad for sometime.
).
used it alot initially, esp. for downloading news and then reading on the way to work – excellent.
now i tend to just use for holiday reading (as i drive to work
not sure if the ebook revolution will happen… i hope so
whats the page turn/refresh rate like, was a bit slow on the iliad… but still usable.
Page turning takes a little over a second maybe, and still does the whole invert+redraw thing.
I find I tend to preempt the page turn as there is a very small delay from pressing the button to anything happening at all.
As much as I’d love it to be instant, it’s not onerous.
ah, about the same as Iliad.
as you say it’s fine when ‘reading’ , you preempt it. just a pain when scanning thru a PDF. but hey that’s the tech, and partly why the power lasts soooo long