Back in January, I covered the unveiling of the Sony Reader at CES in Las Vegas. At the time I thought it was a novel idea (pardon the pun), and wanted to spend some time with one. (See picture below of the Sony Reader, courtesy of Sony)
I finally got my wish - I ordered one back in August, and early November, I received my very own Sony Reader (and yes, I did pay for it). I have spent the last few weeks exploring its uses, benefits, and shortcomings and want to share those with you.
Let’s start by what the Sony Reader is, and then continue on with what it isn’t but what it wants to be.
What The Sony Reader Is
The Sony Reader is a piece of technology which can substitute as a book, or better yet, a collection of books. The internal memory stores a respectable number of pages in the form of one or more eBook files, and external memory in the form of a Memory Stick Pro or SD Card can add up to another 4GB of storage. Unless you are a total speed reader, that’s enough to keep you in words for years.
The Sony Reader uses a “digital paper” (a.k.a electronic ink or eInk) display which provides decent contrast in a reasonably well lit environment. Unlike a traditional electronic display, the digital paper consumers power only when the contents are changed, and as such Sony rates the Reader as being able to support 7900 page changes on a single charge. I have found that number to be unrealistic in the two times I have run out of power - I’m guessing (without having done any detailed experimentation) that in practical use, the number is maybe half that - maybe 3500-4000 page changes.
Because of the size of the pages (in order to keep them readable) a book which might perhaps be 300 pages in paperback might be closer to 700-800 pages (or more if you select the Medium or Large text display modes), so that means the battery use number is a bit misleading, as a typical Reader eBook has more pages than the paper equivalent. In other words, less books per battery charge.
Also, because of how the digital paper works, to change page content, the Reader needs to wipe the whole page to black and then draw the page. This causes a weird flashing effect which at first is annoying, but you quickly learn to ignore and then don’t even realize it’s there. It does make page “turns” rather slow though.
The best looking content for the Sony Reader naturally comes from Sony itself via Sony’s CONNECT service, which is integrated into the CONNECT Reader application which comes with the Sony Reader, and if you want to manage all of the content of the Sony Reader, that software is the only way to do at this time.
The Sony Reader comes with several eBooks preloaded, and excerpts from a number of others. Also included in the Reader is a PDF of the user’s manual, some pictures to demonstrate the monochromatic picture viewing capability of the Sony Reader, and some sample music files (the Sony Reader can play digital music files, but in a severely limited way - see below for more).
When you register the Sony Reader, and authorize the CONNECT Reader software (it can be installed on up to five computers, and you can also authorize several Sony Readers to view DRMed (Digital Rights Management) content), you also get a $50 credit at the CONNECT eBook Store. Sadly, even with the average 20% discount Sony provides on eBooks, they are still extremely expensive in my opinion.
Current titles can range in the $10-20 range, which I think is pretty ridiculous considering you cannot give the eBook to anyone else when you’re done with it, unlike a paper book and the overhead in releasing an eBook is minuscule compared to the cost of printing hundreds of pages on paper and then dealing with traditional book distribution channels.
Although, I will say that the $50 credit does help offset some of the initial umbrage at the cost of eBooks published by Sony CONNECT.
The Sony Reader promotes the ability, as an alternative, to display text, RTF, PDF, and Word files, as well as RSS feeds from Blogs is also somewhat misleading mainly because you end up losing real functionality when you try and import any of these file types.
For example, with text files, you need to provide text in paragraphs without a carriage return at the end of every line, otherwise you will likely end up with incredibly difficult to read pages with alternating long and short lines due to automatic wrapping.
With RTF and Word DOC files, you need to perform quite a bit of reformatting to get the files to be even moderately readable on the Sony Reader, and then includes font formatting too. And you have to have Microsoft Word installed on the system you use to import the RTF or DOC files into the Reader.
And don’t even get me started on PDFs. The display of the Sony Reader is pretty low resolution - perhaps a quarter or a third of a typical letter size page looks best on it. Now imagine shrinking a letter size page with typical 12 or 10 point type down to that size. If you imagine it must be difficult to read because everything has shrunk down to a much smaller size, you’re right. Most folks don’t have the expensive full version of Acrobat so they can’t make their own PDFs, but even if they could, extensive experimentation is required (and after a couple of hours I gave up).
And the promise of being able to download blogs is a laugh. There’s no way (at least not that Sony provides) to do it with just any blog. Instead you have to use the CONNECT Reader software and select among a very limited set of RSS feeds to fetch and convert to the eBook format, but in my tests I found that several of the referenced feeds (including Boing Boing) are no longer supported, and those that area produce horrifically formatted and almost unreadable output.
If CONNECT Reader was the only way to get eBook formatted files for the Sony Reader, I probably would have returned it. However the Sony Reader was not the first eBook Reader from Sony - they used to offer a product called the Librie. And it was out long enough that a number of enterprising developers have created some rudimentary tools to create LRF (non-DRMed eBook files) from text files and web pages.
In fact, the text to eBook converter tool I tried from the Yahoo Librie group downloads area (need to join the group first) is designed to take text files from the Gutenberg project (http://www.gutenberg.org) - a repository of thousands of book texts that have ended up in the public domain because their copyrights have expired. That includes works of folks like Mark Twain, Shakespeare, and countless others. So, if you don’t mind doing a bit of extra work, and like to read classics, this is a real option. Although with the Sony Reader eBook selection menu, it might take you a while to navigate through your book lists sorted by title, 10 titles to a page.
Another developer created an HTML to LRF tool which I found does a much better job of snagging blogs, albeit in a more unorthodox fashion as it doesn’t process RSS feeds, just the web pages. But it’s still not ideal for just that reason.
In any event, there are more tools being developed regularly for the Sony Reader/Librie, and I have high hopes that better looking eBooks from a large variety of sources are not far away. These tools will also make it possible for authors to self-publish for the Sony Reader, albeit without DRM (which is probably a good thing).
What The Sony Reader Is Not
Sony, for some reason I can’t fathom, built an MP3 player into the Sony Reader, but did such an incredibly poor job of it that they should not have bothered - it would have also probably saved a small bit of money in terms of additional components.
As I had previously noted, the Reader can take Sony Memory Stick Pro and SD Card media, and you can copy music onto those cards either directly or via CONNECT Reader. That part is fine. However, when the Sony Reader figures out what music it has available for play, it sorts it all in alphabetical order. There’s no way to set up a play list externally or internally, or sort by artist or album. The Reader simply starts playing the track you select and then continues with whatever the next song is alphabetically.
Furthermore, while you can read an eBook while the music is playing, the control interface to control the music is the same one used to navigate pages for reading, so once you move to eBook reading while music is playing you lose the ability to skip tracks, pause, rewind, etc. All you can do is control the volume unless you want to back up to the menu to switch to the music player interface.
The Sony Reader also includes a picture viewer, and that works a little better as long as you don’t mind your pictures being black and white and somewhat grainy. You can also set up a slide show to show images. I don’t see this as a particularly useful feature, but at least this one is a variation of viewing pages as opposed to the quirky MP3 player which just doesn’t belong (in its current incarnation) in the Reader.
Usability
Using the Sony Reader also takes some getting used to. There is an on/off switch, but instead of conserving battery life, it’s real purpose appears to be to prevent the buttons on the front of the Reader from doing anything if pressed by accident (something that is incredibly easy to do when you put the Reader down or put it in a backpack or pocketbook).
The Sony Reader also comes with removable/replaceable cover which protects the display, but in order to use the Reader you pretty much have to fold the front cover back behind the Reader instead of holding it open like you would a book. That’s because the only buttons to change pages are on the inside edge of the reader (either the two page buttons near the left edge, half way down in the image above, or the round button near the left bottom. This whole configuration makes the Sony Reader somewhat unnatural to use as a book replacement, although even this issue is overcome with time. Ideally the Sony Reader should have previous/next page buttons on the top (so you can hold the Reader with one hand when reading) and on the right side too, so that people who want to read it more like a book can do so.
The menu button and joy stick at lower right take some getting used to as well, especially in that it takes a number of painstakingly long seconds to get to a menu once you hit the menu button, and in fact perform any command.
The number buttons along the bottom of the screen have two purposes. The first is to provide a quick way to select a number menu function when a menu is present. The second is to go to a page in the eBook when you’re in reading mode. But no, you don’t punch in the page number you want to go to. Instead, if you press the 1, you go to the first page in the book, and the 0 gets you to the last page, and the buttons in between get you to an interpolated page number (5 is the middle of the eBook, for example). This means that if you accidentally brush one of the number buttons while reading you can pretty much end up somewhere completely different in the book. Then you have to go to the menu, select the History option and figure out what you really were last looking at before you jumped elsewhere and then go there via the history menu.
One feature I do like, however, especially as someone who has a combination of books and documents on the Sony Reader and reads some of them in parallel, is that the Reader remembers what the most recently read page is for each book you have looked at. That saves battery chewing page flipping to find your place (which is why I would do it with a paper book if I lost my bookmark). And speaking of bookmarks, there is a bookmarking feature as well.
Most of these nuances and annoyances are just a matter of getting used to the Sony Reader. I just wish it were more intuitive, more book-like.
The above notwithstanding, I have actually gotten rather used to my Sony Reader, and like having it available, although I sometimes have to work a bit harder to ignore its shortcomings. And while I still am planning on finding ways to get decent non-DRMed content for it, if desperate enough (meaning I’ve read everything I wanted to that’s already on my Sony Reader), I may plunk down some funds to buy some new books at some point (but not without complaining about the high relative price). However, I certainly do not plan on using it as a music player. That’s what my iPod is for.
In conclusion, I give the Sony Reader a 4.5 out 10.0 on The Richter Scale.
As an addendum, even though the eInk paper does not use any real power when displaying a page, the Sony Reader still needs to be turned off during take off and landing on planes because it is an electronic device with an on/off switch. So that means I still need some sort of paper book or publication to read to keep myself distracted at those times. That’s an annoyance too, but one I don’t see a work around for.
I found at Amazon.com from a third party seller.
