MSRP: $349.99

Purpose: To read electronic books. Secondary functions are displaying black and white pictures in JPG or PNG format and playing music in MP3 and ACC format.

(Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code on the Sony Reader.)

This device does nothing that you cannot already do with a laptop computer, a tablet computer, desktop computer, most cell phones, or most PDAs. It is designed for the sole purpose of reading books and perhaps listening to music as you read. It is very good at this.

First, a few basics about the unit, it is small, about the size of a paperback book — 7” x 5” x ¼”. The screen is 6” (diagonal measurement) 800 x 600 4 grayscale e-paper (E-ink) with 167 dpi resolution. The internal rechargeable battery provides about 7,500 page views per charge (20 hours more or less in use.) Controls are easy to use. The system is built on the Motorola Dragonball MXL CPU and provides about 91 MB of internal flash memory book storage. Additional storage up to 4 GB is available through either a removable SD card or Memory Stick. The OS is MontaVista Hard Hat Linux 2.4.17. Interface to a computer is through a USB 1.1 (Type A, the small one) and there are also connectors for power, headphones, and an optional cradle.

Supported book formats are BBeB (a Sony unreleased specification with DRM), LRF, DPF, TXT, and RTF. Sony CONNECT software supplied with the unit to assist in transfer between the computer and the Reader as well as between the Sony CONNECT bookstore and the computer for purchase and loading of books. Internal fonts are from Bitstream and include Dutch (~Times New Roman), Swiss (~Ariel), and Courier.

The Reading Experience

If you have never seen e-paper you would think the pictures of it are faked. When I first saw it in the store I thought it was a sticker on a blank screen rather than the actual display. It is that crisp. It is like reading a piece of paper. There is no sensation of pixels or ill-formed characters. It is a delight to the eyes. The display is not backlit and is as easy to read outdoors in bright sun as it is to read under a light indoors. Since the e-ink display holds the image without additional power drain, there is low demand on the battery ensuring enough power for long reading sessions.

While called black on white, the display is really dark gray on light gray as the E-ink is actually micro capsules of charged pigments that rotate to either the black group or the white group. To reduce ghosting from one page to another page the entire screen will flash a reverse image of the next page prior to displaying that page. This slight delay becomes less noticeable with use and gives readers a chance to look away for an instant to refocus their eyes (well, for me at least) to avoid eye strain while reading.

For all book formats except PDF there is a choice of small, medium, and large size fonts that will scale all text proportionately. The display can also be rotated from portrait to landscape views.

Reader Content

Out of the box the Reader is supplied with several complete books and many excerpts of books available through the Sony CONNECT Store. Among the complete books are “1984” and “Vanguard, Book One”. There are over 10,000 additional titles available in the Sony CONNECT Store including many current bestsellers. The biggest problem with the Sony CONNECT Store offerings is the DRM. If you change from one Reader to another reader you lose your access to the books. While eBooks are generally cheaper than paper versions and Sony gives a discount off the MSRP of the eBooks, you may still be stuck with a pile of electrons that you cannot read. I therefore try to acquire as many titles as I can without DRM restrictions.

User content can be added to the Reader in LRF, RTF, TXT, and PDF formats. For all but TXT format the Title and Author information from the Properties box will be used to identify the book in the indexes. For TXT the file name is used as the Title and the creation date is listed as the Author. After working with the Reader for some time I have settled on RTF (Rich Text Format) as the first choice for loading my own content. The following is a brief overview of each format:

LRF is a non DRM version of the Sony BeBB format. Several programs such as BookDesigner support it as an output and several conversion routines are currently in development to translate DOC, TXT, and HTML to LRF. All of these currently seem to be hit-or-miss and can be classified as beta versions at best.

RTF (my choice) is an easy format to convert documents to as it is directly supported by most word processors including MS Word and OpenOffice. It supports font sizing, font selection, and paragraph justification. It does not support page breaks, any graphics, or boarders.

TXT has a subset of the support of RTF. Since most TXT documents have hard returns at the end of each line and this results in one long line followed by a shorter line with the pattern repeated throughout the document. It is a quick-and-dirty way to get content to the Reader but not a pleasure to read (reminiscent of emails that have been forwarded a number of times.)

Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code on the Sony Reader.PDF, the universal standard of electronic portable documents, are a major problem on the Reader. Since most PDF files are based on the US standard of letter size or the European A4 size, these become extremely hard if not impossible to read on the small screen. The font sizing available in other document formats provides perhaps a 5% enlargement. The only successful PDFs for the Reader are those specifically formatted for the screen size. But PDFs do have one advantage that other formats do not, the ability to display fonts other than Dutch, Swiss, or Courier through PDF’s font embedding capability. There are many packages in addition to Adobe Acrobat that can produce quality PDF files.

Sources of Content

In addition to the Sony CONNECT Store there are many sources of material available on the Internet. What follows is just the tip. There are many more available with new ones popping up all the time. Some are large sites and others are very small. Some are free, some ask for a donation, some use it as a hook to get you to buy other things (like their regular paper books), and some are just there to make a profit.

Project Gutenberg

Located at the Gutenberg Wiki Page, Project Gutenberg was founded in 1971 by Michael Hart to create and distribute eBooks and related technology. They claim to be the largest collection of free eBooks in the world. Most eBooks are available in TXT and HTML from their web site. All classic literature is there. The largest single language for texts is English and all are copyright free and there are no DRM restrictions. Think of it as open source for reading.

ManyBooks.net

Located at manybooks.net, ManyBooks formats Project Gutenberg files in many popular formats including LRF (for the Sony Reader), PDB (for Palm PDAs, eReader, and cell phones), zTXT, RB (Rocket eBook), PDF (and Large Print PDF), iPDF (Iliad PDF), DOC, iSilo, MOBI (MobiPocket), iPod Notes (for iPod), and many others. They have also started a site for “WAP-enabled” cell phones. Most of the Project Gutenberg titles are there along with additional titles that have been donated to them by the copyright holders such as “The Hacker Crackdown” from 1993. Most of the offerings, as with Gutenberg, are classic literature.

Baen Free Library

Located at baen.com, this is the same Baen as of Science Fiction fame. Eric Flint is the Librarian and since 2000 they have been offering free titles from their print collection. Generally the first novel of a series is posted (complete text) and there are copies around of the nine or so CDs of their books. They feel that you will sample their work and want to buy more. They feel that the increased sales and exposure is worth more than the few sales that they may lose. This is great Science Fiction by writers that you have heard about or read before.

Silk Pagoda

Located at silkpagoda.com, the Silk Pagoda provides new works and lost classics from Asia (and beyond.) Specializing in English translations of classic Asian literature, they offer many low and no cost books along with DVDs full of reading material formatted for eBook readers such as the Sony Reader and those using the Microsoft backed LIT format.

USENET Groups

There are many USENET groups that concentrate on eBooks. Some deal in general topics and others are specialized to either a specific eBook reader (such as Palm) or to a topic (such as Technical.) They are a great source of material.

Conclusion

After over a month of using the device I would purchase it again. It has been a great help to me. There are some limitations that restrict the functionality and usefulness of it; however, these are far outweighed by the convenience and accessibility of the Reader.

1. Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code on the Sony Reader.No search feature. Books are read from start to finish. While there are bookmark features and a history of the last 100 pages you stopped at, there is no ability to find a specific term in a book. This limits the ability to store and access reference books such as programming guides.

2. No annotation features. You cannot highlight a section of text or add a marginal note. The best you can do is to bookmark the page.

3. Limit Table of Contents support and then only in PDF, LRF, and BeBB files (if programmed at file creation.)

4. No direct Internet or WiFi support.

5. Windows support only. No Mac or Linux support for the Sony CONNECT software. However you can add and delete books, music, and pictures to the SD cards or Memory Sticks and then load these into the Reader.

While future versions of the Sony Reader and other devices will be better, the key points of the Reader today are a great screen, an enjoyable reading experience, and a wide variety of non DRM material available.