Tales

 I got a Sony ebook PRS-500 2 years ago.  Before that I was using a Toshiba PDA as the platform for ebooks.  The difference with a ebook and a PDA, including iphone, is that it uses a technology call e-ink instead of LCD.  the display does not emit light.  So it gives people more of the feeling of reading a book than looking at a computer screen.  Plus e-ink will consume less energy, thus longer battery life.

2 months ago, Sony released its new model of ereader, PRS-700, here is a review from Kris Abel:

“Sony’s latest Reader Digital Book allows you to turn a page by merely swiping your finger across the screen. When that page is the contents index, you merely have to touch the title of a chapter to have the book automatically flip to it. It’s a delight to read with your fingers again. As with Sony’s previous eBook devices, the new Reader uses a special E-ink display that is designed to duplicate the look and presence of paper. The technology is still relatively young and the addition of touchscreen controls comes as a bit of a surprise, but Sony has achieved their task well. The touch interface is responsive, simple, and delivers a natural feel and flow to reading. A main menu, offering big friendly icons to touch, make it easy to access your books, the title you are currently reading, your notes, photos, and music. Everything is right there as soon as you open the cover, as it should be.

With Sony’s previous model, the PRS-505, they managed to get many elements right and its pleasant to see them carry those forward instead of making any drastic changes. The Reader is still about the size and shape of a notebook, offers a large 6” monochrome screen that can display text, illustration, and digital pictures with the quality of print, hold approximately 350 eBooks, maintain a long battery life (7,500 page turns), and support a wide range of file formats including BBeb, PDF, EPUB, RTF, TXT, JPEG, PNG, GIF, BMP, MP3, and AAC. You can use it with eBooks from a number of online stores including Sony’s own eBook store, your own home-made documents by converting them with included software, and with a set of connected headphones even use the device to listen to music, audiobooks, and podcasts.

With the new touchscreen controls come a number of valuable enhancements, chief of which is the extended options for text size. There are now five levels of text size to choose from, plus an on-screen scroll bar that you can drag with your finger to zoom into the page, helping you customize the size of the text as you need. The scroll bar takes a few tries to get used to, but the results are better than you’d get with physical buttons and reformatting of the text, a process that has to change the entire book you are reading, is near-instantaneous.

The onscreen controls have made it easy for Sony to add a more convenient options menu, it merely hovers off-screen and when you call it up by pressing the physical “options” button at the bottom of the device, it pulls up a quick screen giving you access to features based on the page you are reading. This makes it easier to change the orientation of the page, from portrait to landscape for example. It also gives you access to two new features, the ability to highlight a body of text and the ability to add a virtual notation to the page using a virtual keyboard. 

Highlighting is fairly easy, there are two icons. Tap one to add highlighting, any text you run across with your finger will be captured in a grey field, and tap the other icon to then turn your finger into an eraser so you can run your finger over the same body of text and return it to normal. The results don’t quite stand out or are as readable as a real highlighter, but it serves the purpose.

The trickier feature is the notation as you have to first highlight a line of text and then tap on it to bring up the option to add a notation to it. Not the most intuitive system. This brings up a virtual keyboard and it’s here that the touch controls falter under your fingertips. I found that as a typed, the screen only captured every third or fourth letter and that the better option is to use the included stainless steel stylus included. Secured in a little hiding slot at the top of the Reader, packing at the onscreen keyboard with the stylus works very well, allowing you to quickly and accurately peck out letters with light taps. Once you have a few notes written, you can quickly access them through a dedicated index. There’s one for each book and one at the main menu that lists all the notes on your entire Reader device. 

The final improvement is the built-in reading light system. A series of miniature LED lights placed along the side of the screen, the light is not the ideal solution, you can see the naked bulbs peeking out from within their side housing which is a distraction and the light they cast onto the screen isn’t very uniform, the edges are better lit than the centre of the page, but it is better than no light at all and until there’s a breakthrough in E-ink screens that allow them to be back-lit the same as LCD and TFT screens on mobile devices (and somehow still retain their paper-like nature), then admittedly Sony’s light is the best solution available. There are two levels of brightness and thanks to the use of LED lights, the power drain is minimal allowing the Reader to maintain its extraordinary battery lifespan.

The enhancements arrive on top of basic technical upgrades, the new Reader has 450 MB of system memory, twice that of the previous model, plus card slots for both Memory Stick Duo and SD cards, but also comes packaged with a new version of Sony eBook Library Software. Version 2.5 includes a wider range of file formats that it can support for conversion over to the device, including Microsoft Word Documents, EPUB files, and with added free software from Adobe, protected PDF files. The only upgrade Sony has yet to achieve is to make their software available to Mac users, even at Version 2.5, it is still limited to Windows Vista and XP users. 

One final smart choice on Sony’s part worth mentioning is their decision to offer the new $400 touchscreen Reader as an optional model, not a replacement for the less expensive, but non-touch Reader which is still available at $300. While both represent more money than you might normally invest in reading material, both devices offer a remarkable way to enjoy eBooks, a new reading trend that is quickly finding its way into the hearts of many, including my own.”