To sony or not to Sony ?

[faintdreams]

I'm in the market for an ebook reader, and as much as i don't like the entire screen turning black during refresh, I think e-ink wins over LCD for battery longevity and low screen glare.

I think I'd rather ea 6 inch reader than a 5 inch one, and the ones that seem to get the best reviews across the most formats are the Sony E-readers.

Do you have a Sony pocket or Touch? (I am in the UK so the Daily isn't available). What do you think of them and what are the pros and cons of each.

As I understand it the pocket does not have a memory card slot whereas the Daily does?

How do they each deal with pdf reflow?  Unfortunately most of my e-library is pdf, and I have not found a low error way to convert them as yet. (I have tried Calibre, but especially my 'Dummies' titles just end up with mostly unreadable text)

Barring mechanical failure, I want to get an e-reader which will last me a few years, so I want to get the right one for me on fist purchase.

I have never owned an e-reader before, but since buying my iTouch I've seen the appeal of e-devices. I am also starting the research on my dissertation and suddenly need to plough through LOTS of e-text.

thoughts?

thanks in advance

Comments

[shanaqui]

I like my Sony a lot. I've got the Pocket version. It's light and very robust, so it's good to carry around, and though it does slow up when I've got a lot of books on it, I've got over 200 on there at the moment without any real problem.

how does it handle pdf's

[faintdreams]

thanks for replying.

Do you read any pdf's (without converting them first), and what problems have you come upoun regards the reader and formats?

Re: how does it handle pdf's

[shanaqui]

Yes, it handles PDFs okay. Sometimes I prefer to use PDFs, in fact, because it gives a more accurate page number. I'm getting fonder of epubs, though.

The software that comes with it was, at least when I used it, counter-intuitive and buggy. I use Calibre instead. That and the slowing up when the memory was about three quarters full have been my only real problems.

[elf]

I have a Sony PRS-505, which is no longer produced. I gather it's closest to the Pocket, except that mine has a 6" screen and two memory card slots. While I love keeping my ebooks in the memory card slots, I know I could work fine without them. (And I only care, really, because I have a number of 15mb+ gaming PDFs.)

I would prefer a 5" screen; if they'd been available when I bought mine, I'd've gotten one. (But I read ebooks for two years on a PDA with a 320x320 pixel screen before I got the Sony; "fits comfortably in one hand" was *high* on my priority list.)

The 505 does tolerable on reflow. I believe (but am not sure) the Touch has a zoom function; I don't think the Pocket does. How well reflow works depends mostly on how the PDF was made, which you have no control over. (I have Acrobat Pro, and I open PDFs in that, add tags to make better reflow, crop the white borders out, and otherwise tweak to make myself happy. And if I'm really concerned, I convert to Word & reformat the whole thing. I like doc conversion.)

General bits: Scanned PDFs won't reflow at all, because what you're seeing isn't text; it's images. PDFs made from Word or InDesign should reflow okay; those keep parts of the original paragraph structure in the conversion process. PDFs made from other programs are erratic--some work, some don't, depending on the program & exact settings.

A lot of commercial ebooks aren't tagged for reflow or screenreaders, so when they reflow, the formatting is lost. A lot of times, you get broken lines where it reads each line of original text as a paragraph, so you get results like:

Small brown hands were clenched in a sleeping fist.
I unpeeled
them and looked at the stubby, anemic, orange-tipped
nails. This
color I knew to be henna. I looked at my own hands
grasping hers,
my glossy, noired nails contrasting against her orange
manicure.
Mine were Western, hers Eastern, so different but both
seeking the
same folly: to change the color of our nails.

Research. All the current e-readers *suck* for research. They're terrific for reading novels, and lousy for anything where you might want to flip back and forth between sections or pages, especially if you want to switch back & forth between several books at once. The World Library & Information Congress has a recent study about ebooks & readers in academic settings.

I love my ebook reader, but I'd go crazy trying to use it for academic studying. It's not impossible to use one, especially like the Touch that allows annotations & easy bookmarking, but you'd have to work around its limitations. And the manufacturers & bookstore reps don't like to mention that these devices aren't quite up to academic uses yet.

Kindle allows annotations, but not for PDFs. The iRex line is best for professional & academic use, but it's horribly expensive. And "best" doesn't mean "good," just "better than the others, which really aren't designed for anything but casual novel reading."

thankyou !

[faintdreams]

that congress report seems quite well thought out so I will definitely read that. Thankyou

I don't yet have adobe pro. but might consider it (depending on cost) after what you have said

PDF bits

[elf]

Acrobat Pro is (1) expensive and (2) complex, with a steep learning curve. I have over 10 years professional experience with it; I am *comfortable* adding bookmarks, cropping pages, inserting & deleting content, resizing fonts one line of text at a time (because that's how it works), exporting the contents & reformatting them in Word, adding tags, editing tags (a nightmare), changing metadata, and various other tweaks that change ebooks from unwieldy troublesome things to comfortable to read.

I'm willing to help other people learn these things (I have lots of experience because I love doing these things), but I didn't learn them quickly, and getting comfortable with them takes practice. Which I love, and not everyone does. If you don't like tweaky doc editing tricks, it's probably easier to get something like Calibre that lets you convert to another format, and use tools to edit that. Even if it screws up the layout, 'cos editing in Acrobat is often painful.

The big problem with PDFs: They were never intended to be an onscreen format. They were designed for printing, so that what you saw onscreen was what came out on paper. They were specifically made *not* to reflow. They were made to be create-able by dozens of different formats that would all *look* the same in PDF, but have different bits of coding behind them.

PDFs work well *if* they're designed with a page-size that matches the screen you're reading on. I've got dozens of fanfic PDFs I've made for my Reader; they work great. (Which doesn't mean they'd work great for others; I prefer a small font, and making it larger means reflow, which at its best isn't great.) OTOH, reading letter-sized pages with 1" margins on it sucks. I have a couple of quick tweaks I do to make it suck less, but that's about as far as it goes.

(Someday soon I really should do a bunch of pictures of different types of PDFs on my Reader.)

[tameiki]

I've got a Sony PRS 500 and PRS 700. Both of these are no longer made but you can find them easily on Ebay as I did mine. PDFs work fine until you enlarge the text larger than what it was originally (like going from small to medium), then you get the fragmented formatting like another commenter put in as an example. Both have memory card slots, which I really like.

We got a Pocket edition for the mother-in-law and, while she loves it, the lack of memory card slot was a big turn off for me, personally.

Sometimes, I'll just convert the PDF file using an online free conversion service and put it into WORD format. That works well for the 500 and 700. I have yet to figure out how to use Calibre successfully since I'm a bit technology challenged. XD

Of all three of the Sonys we have, I like the PRS 700 the best. The touch screen is the biggest plus for me, as is the ease of use.

Good luck getting your first ereader! :)

[isis]

What is the problem with the lack of memory card slot? I have the Pocket and like it a lot.

[tameiki]

The not having a memory card slot is strictly my own preference. I have a lot of ebooks and like to have the option of having them all on a memory card without having to worry that it'll slow the reader down if I have too many :)

[babaca]

Next time we're in San Francisco. I will show you how to use Calibre. It's really fairly easy. ^____^

[tameiki]

I'll take you up on that! So far all I've managed to do is frustrate myself trying to use it. I've gotta be doing something wrong. Will make sure to load it on my laptop for San Fran. =)

[finch]

I have a Sony pocket and I love it to pieces. Most PDFs are readable on it if I up the text size, though sometimes the page reflow ends up with just the last line or two on a page on the screen by itself. Mostly Calibre conversion works okay for me, though, so your books may work differently.

The Pocket does not have a memory card, but that hasn't really been a problem for me yet. I've put a couple volumes of manga on there without an issue.

It does get a little slow when you have a lot of books on there - I have about 400 at the moment. It's only an issue when I've plugged it into the computer, though.

[jecook]

I have a Touch reader (PRS-600) and it's functional for strictly e-books, _simple_ PDF files, and text documents (words docs, HTML, etc.) converted using Calibre. Technical manuals or scanned PDFs... not so much, especially if the PDF does not allow reflow, or was designed to be printed rather then read on a screen.

Unfortunately, the devices that I've love to see (large screen e-Ink readers that can handle scanned PDFs or complex layouts are either nonexistent (Plastic Logic's Que has not shipped yet, and iRiver refuses to sell the Story here in the US) or cost an arm and a leg (The Que, iPad) or are knobbled by DRM and format support (Kindle DX)

[isis]

I really like my Sony Pocket edition. But PDF is really hard to deal with. In my case, I was trying to read the Malcolm Gladwell articles from the New Yorker that are archived on gladwell.com. The native PDFs are in teeny font, and increasing the font size messes up the flow; I tried to use calibre to convert it and ended up with something unreadable, because the three-column format was interpreted as one.

[cyprinella]

I have a Sony 505 and a 600 and I greatly prefer the 505. The touch screen on the 600 is okay, but I don't use it much and I find that the glare on it sucks, especially under fluorescent lights.

[babaca]

I have a 500 that still works chipped screen and all and a 600 Touch. While their can be a bit of a glare problem on the 600 in natural sunlight it's screen is at it's best. I love when the sun is coming through a window in my house so I can sit and read without having to tilt the reader to remove glare from incandescent and fluorescent lighting.

PDFs... well it seems to depend on the pdf. On the Touch you can zoom the pdf file but it can do some odd wrapping around the larger it is. Zooming it kind of bugs me because just when you get it the size you like when you click next page, you have to rezoom it to the size you like. So I tend to just go ahead and convert most PDFs into epubs using Calibre.

The 500 is ancient so pdfs could only be small (which was tiny) and medium (which was just as tiny).