purplecat: Hand Drawn picture of a Toy Cat (Default)
purplecat ([personal profile] purplecat) wrote in [community profile] ebooks2013-10-01 09:12 pm
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Recommend a Replacement for a Sony PRS-350

My Sony PRS-350 is becoming increasingly flakey so I'm looking around for a new eBook reader and I'd love to hear any recommendations.

My main requirements are:

  1. ePub format support (I have a lot of ePubs)
  2. Plays nicely with Calibre (I read a lot of fanfic on my ereader and use Calibre to manage conversion)
  3. Decent zooming of PDFs.

    This is something of a specialist requirement, I find not all PDFs worked well in the Sony reader when I just enlarged the font size (diagrams and equations in particular didn't like it), but the Sony eReader's actual zooming function was really horrible and you kept having to switch in and out of it to turn pages, so I'd love something that would let me read scientific papers on the device with a bit more ease.

    EDIT: I know I'm never going to get Adobe Reader style functionality on an e-Ink device. I never expected to be reading PDFs on it, but it's become something I find useful. So anything that improves the PDF experience over that on the PRS-350 is good and anything that makes it harder is bad.
  4. At least 12 hours battery life (which most ereaders have, but not all tablets if you want to recommend one of them).


I probably want something a little larger than the PRS-350. I loved the portability of it, but I was magnifying everything up at least one font size, and that's a problem that will only get worse and the lack of screen real-estate also contributed to the problems I was having with the PDFs.

If I can access Analog Science Fiction and Fact from the UK on it (which I've not been able to do since Barnes & Noble bought out Fictionwise) then that would be an added bonus.

Playing nicely with Adobe Digital Editions on a Mac (which the Sony doesn't) would also be a plus since I have a book I purchased for $1 in ADE and I'd sort of like to read it some day, even though I only paid a dollar for it.

Beyond that I'm open to suggestions. I've managed quite happily without a wireless connection but I'm prepared to be convinced I would benefit from one.
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rebecca2525: Abby Sciuto from NCIS with the word "geek" (Default)

[personal profile] rebecca2525 2013-10-02 06:49 am (UTC)(link)
I have the Sony PRS-T2 (after I've lost my 350). Since it's bigger than the 350, reading PDF in landscape is quite okay as long as it's plain text, but diagrams and formulas with tiny sub/superscripts etc are probably always going to be a hassle. What the PRS-T2 does very well though is PDFs with two-column layout in portrait mode; then it will show you 1/4th of the page at a time, and you can just page through the 1/4th pages like normal pages. Similar for three-column PDFs. So if you have a lot of those types of PDFs, it might be worth giving it a try. OTOH, diagrams spanning the whole page within two-column layout are probably going to be annoying.

I haven't used the zooming function on PDFs so far, but I can give it a try these days and report back. BTW, I remember when I decided for this eReader, there were good videos on YouTube demonstrating the features and their handling, so maybe you find something there, for other eReaders as well.

But overall, for scientific papers with lots of diagrams and formulas, a tablet might be the better option.
purplecat: Hand Drawn picture of a Toy Cat (books)

[personal profile] purplecat 2013-10-02 09:29 am (UTC)(link)
Sensible handling of two column PDFs would be a dream!! It would be good to know about the zooming. The main issue I had with the PRS-350's zoom was that I had to switch into zoom mode, zoom, read, then switch out to turn the page. Since the context switch between zoom and non-zoom on e-Ink is understandably quite slow, it was really painful to go through a three step process (unzoom, turn page, rezoom) just to carry on reading. If you felt like just checking out how the page turning worked when zooming, that would be really useful.

I never really intended to use the eReader for scientific papers, but I've actually found it really handy (even with the limitations of the PRS-350). I like using Calibre to organise the papers, and since I have a long commute the ereader is quite a good way to just flick through the latest publications and see what's going on. I'd still print out or read on a monitor for anything I wanted to seriously get to grips with.
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