ebooks | To sony or not to Sony ?

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

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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."

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

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.)

To sony or not to Sony ?

no subject

thankyou !

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