The Sony Book Reader

I bought the Sony PRS-500 book reader pictured above last week. I had been researching it for a couple of weeks. This reader reads Sony e-book formatted books, Word documents, PDF files, TXT files, etc.. It also plays music and displays pictures. The product came out at the end of last year (2006) and retails for $300. With your purchase, you get $50 worth of books from the Sony bookstore and 50 free "classics" of your choice. (though classics prior to 1923 can be found for free at manybooks.net).

Mostly, I very much like this book reader. The only dissatisfactions that I have have to do with software features that are not very mature but could be incorporated very easily into the existing product. Here is a summary:

The GOOD

• e-ink technology makes for amazing book-like reading
  
• size: 9 oz., 1/2 inch thin, 6" display - perfect combination of portability and readability
  
• battery life - amazing - 7500 page turns estimated. The device uses no battery while reading - just during page changes
  
• love having multiple books, articles and blogs 'carted' with me at one time
  
• relatively easy to put online articles into reader
  
• can change the text size dynamically
  
• expandable memory for even more books though I can't imagine needing to (stock - it can hold 80 normal sized books)
  
• access to classics published prior to 1923 for free (expired copyrights) at manybooks.net
  
• very simple software
  
• good bookstore
  
• most books are cheaper than buying through Amazon (example: Walter Isaacson: Einstein: His Life and Universe - Amazon price: $19.20, Sony price: $13.59)
  

The BAD

• Sony store doesn't have all titles - needs more
  
• comes with a very limited RSS capability. Only offers a handful of popular RSS feeds (blogs) and the format is too small. Plus I have noticed that it is not updated very frequently. This is EASY to fix - just bolt on a general third-party RSS reader (they are almost generic these days) and make sure the format is of appropriate size. This is (for me) a killer ap for these things. I cut-and-paste from my RSS reader (bloglines) into a Word document and then import into the Reader. Easy steps but easily avoided with minimal software work by Sony.
  
• Bad PDF support. Basically a PDF document gets shrunken to the Sony screen size so you can't read it. Again - this woud just take an easy software update and access to Adobe's API to fix.
  
• Unlike the iPod, the you can't make the Sony automatically synch up with the PC library through their software - you have to manually move articles over. That's fine and easy but I'd like an option for the automatic synch.
  
• no wifi capability. While I didn't buy it for that it would be nice in future products.
  
• dependent on Sony formatted books and it's bookstore.
  

As I said, the software updates would be easy to solve for Sony even with the existing reader and I actually expect them to happen. Though part of the equation will be how popular these things become. If Sony can sell more units by offering better RSS and PDF suppor they will certainly add these.

Not only do I like reading books on this, but I enjoy downloading internet articles and reading them later in an easier-to-read format than online on the PC. For example, I get a daily summary of all of Salon's articles (for a $30/year fee) in one file which is very easy to transport into the book reader.

This is an essential product if you travel a lot and are sick of bringing oodles of books and papers with you. It's a useful product if you like to read online content but hate reading articles of any length directly on the PC. It's also a useful product if you enjoy having access to books for cheaper prices.

The Sony PRS-500 is one of the very few e-ink technology products on the market and should be the product that starts making this technology more wide-spread although a few improvements would make it even more killer. I do sort of hate depending on Sony though... (but Apple doesn't have one right now!!!).