I’m a bibliophile. I enjoy the look of their spines on my shelves, I love browsing book shops, I like the feel of a well thumbed page and the decadence of a limited edition but I struggle with their wasteful format. In addition to my inner-hippy turmoil, I’ve been reading a great deal of research for work, downloading, printing and stapling pdfs to read on the train home. Even with the printer on economy settings and recycling the paper afterwards, I’m guzzling wood at an unhealthy rate so looked into an electronic document reader.

After looking at a few alterntives, such as pda’s and using my PSP I discovered that the Sony Reader seemed to answer most of my requirements. After some web ferreting it was clear that although they have ‘plans’ to launch the Reader in the UK, it doesn’t seem to be a priority so 10 minutes on Ebay later I was awaiting delivery of a Sony PRS-500 for around £240 including delivery.

User Interface and Experience

Out of the box the Reader looks slightly old fashioned. Dark blue with chrome plastic detailing, about the dimensions of a paperback (but only 1/2 cm thick) inside a soft pseudo-leather case. Its interface a mixture of circular rocker switches, small buttons, a mini thumbstick and 10 clunky numerical buttons. If you’ve ever unboxed a video iPod or an LG Chocolate you are unlikely to be impressed. The physical user interface seems clumsy and confused.

The main selling point of the Sony Reader is the 6 inch e-ink screen. Upon flicking the power switch you are greated with what appears to be an old school–4 shades of grey–LCD. Until, that is, you realise there is no illumination, its strangely matte, and very sharp. For eyes accustomed to mobile phones and laptops you soon you find yourself tilting it under lights and gawping at its refelctionless, paper-like qualities. Because of the lack of illumination, the display isn’t harsh on your eyes, in fact it is arguably as comfortable to read as a book.

Pressing either the next and back buttons or tilting the two-way rocker navigates through documents. Although they appeared clumsy, the placement of these buttons has been well thought out for use in either portrait of landscape modes. Holding the ’size’ button for a few seconds will flip the display between vertical and horizontal. A useful feature especially for the one handed commuter which would appear to be a large audience. Operation of the Reader can be accomplished with one hand and the screen is readable even at oblique angles, as you will be invariably pressed into a fellow commuters armpit.

One notably strange feature is the way in which the e-ink updates. On each page turn the screen floods black and then cleans the empty areas back to white. Its an process somehow reminicent of an etch-a-sketch. The experience takes a fraction of a second and lasts less than a manual turn of a printed page. Sony warns on the packaging that ‘ghosting’ is normal and a ‘feature of the display’. You do find that, at the edges of the screen, there will be some ghostly characters. Initially odd, but it doesn’t harm the experience. With a battery that lasts for 7500 pages turns (the way the screen works, its not constantly draining power) you forgive the reader its foibles or ‘features’. The non-book fetishist, however, may get feeling that the e-ink technology isn’t quite 100% finalised.

The main navigation matches the look of the Reader. A little dated, solid and dependable, but not exciting, emotional or inviting. It is, however, simple to use with each document displayed in a list of 10 items (the purpose of those numerical buttons becomes clear) separated into pages by author, content or filetype. I expect this may become unwieldy with hundreds of documents but for the average reader its a simple interface which will navigate you to your document with minimal frills or thrills.

Reading through a document is a pleasure and there are a few other interface features (such as a ‘mark’ button which folds over the corner of the page) which I haven’t yet explored. Within a few page turns its easy to forget you are looking at an electronic device.

Updating the Content

Being a Sony product it was bound to try to push a proprietary format and PC-only software* but since Parallels has opened up an almost fully operational Windows system on the Mac I wasn’t daunted by the system requirements. Plugging the reader in via USB recognised it first time, a bit of software and firmware updating (remember the days when hardware just worked, without firmware updates every month) and I was up and running.

The Sony ‘CONNECT’ software is pretty much the poor mans iTunes with access to a few thousand titles for $10-$15 a piece. If you’re without a US registered credit card, however, you can only browse so I can’t comment on quality / purchase process / download experience etc.

What you can do (and what I really wanted the reader for in the first place) was to download various formats of content to transfer onto the Reader to consume in my own time. The torrent sites are full of ebooks but they are in such bizarre formats and languages that its frankly not really worth the effort but there are many free ebook sites (such as the excellent Manybooks.net) if you’re looking to stock up on classics.

Dragging pdfs/word/rtf/BBeB book files onto the reader icon within the ‘CONNECT’ software copies them across without any problems, the documents appearing in the main menu on the Reader. Although able to read A4 Pdfs, they are just too wide (even with switching the display to landscape) the font is too small and the processor struggles with long delays turning pages. Saving a document as a narrow width pdf or in text only is preferable. I’ve also found rtf works fine with the Reader doing a kind of conversion when you first open the document but subsequent accesses are instantaneous.

Documents can also be accessed via an SD card or, unsurprisingly for a Sony product, Memory sticks. I haven’t played around with this yet so I’m not sure not good it really is. Once I have, I will update this review. The Reader can also cope with Mp3s and imagery (in four shades of grey) but it feels like using the hardware out of context and it’s not the devices’ forte.

Summary

I hope this lengthy description was useful to people interested in the Sony Reader. Although there was some PR out there, there was little user experience information on the product. Overall I love the Reader, its a pleasure to use. Although the PC only software* is an annoyance, its easy for Parallels owners and dispite the US only shop, its no hardship sourcing content from the UK. The restrictions imposed by Sony are more than made up by the supported document formats and the reading experience. I took the Reader on a recent trip to Paris loaded up with a shelf full of books, technical documentation for work a few presentations saved out as pdfs. I carried a suitcase of reading options to suit my mood in a slimmer than paperback device.

Although ebooks will never replace the physical printed variety for me, they do mimic my consumption of music. I download and purchase from iTunes, but if I really love an album I will buy the CD to put on my shelf. The Sony Reader is a pleasureable, and environmentally preferable method of reading transient material that you don’t necessarily want to put on your shelves. Now if I could link it up with a Solio charger I’d be even happier.

Update: Pdf Handling

Phil asked what the pdf handling is like. The short answer is ‘not very good’ but there are a few methods of improving the experience. The Reader takes the pdf and scales it to display a full page on the screen. As many pdfs online are formatted for A4 paper, this makes reading the scaled versions almost impossible. You can zoom into the document (one level) and rotate the document 90 degrees which does help the legibility, but the Readers processor is not really up to the job. Large pdfs (greater than 2mb in size) a very painful to read as the time is takes to update the screen on turning the page can take up to five seconds.

If you can, format the pdf for the Readers screen (90.6mm x 122.4mm) and save them as black and white. This will stop the need for scaling and keep the load on the processor to a minimum. Sony have created a guide for this if you aren’t familiar with the process. The best option however is to convert the pdf to an ebook format. Mobipocket have an excellent free bit of software called the ebook creator which allows you to import a pdf, word doc or html page, add meta data (cover image, isbn etc) and then export them as ebook files. This gives far better results than trying to use pdfs directly on the Reader. For the Mac users, try Docudesk UnPdf2. The trial will convert pdfs to the .lrf format for free with a few customise options to tweak how the text wraps and image handling.

Update: OSX

After Gerry asked about OSX integration I had a bit of a Google and found the Docudesk PRS browser. It’s a no frills application which allows you to access your Reader without having to use Parallels. Pretty much all you can do is add and remove files, but its a step in the right direction! Worked for me with no issues on a Macbook running OSX 10.4.10. So now you can manage your Sony Reader on your Mac by either an SD card reader, or this Docudesk software.

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