My portable ebook reader
I’m used to buy about 3 / 4 IT books a month, each one usually has more than 600 pages. As well as I like travelling and I would occupy all the space of a room just for my books, I need them in electronic format (an SD card could help me save some space here in Ireland, with so high house prices).
As well as I care about my eyes, I couldn’t read all the ebook on my laptop LCD monitor. I need some e-Ink enabled devices (electronic paper, not translucent). And I would like to read them while I’m in bed, in the bathroom or everywhere else.
After studying a lot the available devices, I decided to buy the Sony PRS-505 and I’ve to say that I’m so proud of it!
The screen refresh in about 1 secs, but it’s not a problem (and it’s like that on all e-Ink devices). I have no hurry usually when reading and I could waste 1 second while switching pages 
.
Well, it is easy go get used to these devices. 7 inches display is enough if you want to read books without images and other kind of non-textual content, but probably it is not enough if you have to read magazine or IT books.
But no worries! Some really nice guys have developed very useful tools for converting content from almost everything (even web pages or rss feed) to the sony .lrf format. Some of these useful softwares services are:
- libprs500
- pdf2lrf
- web2book
- www.feedbooks.com (oh, absolutely love this!!!)
I’m reading at the moment a Microsoft certification exams book on my PRS, standard A4 pdf format converted to lrf (I got double of the pages, but at a larger and viewable size). And it look awesome!
The bookmark feature is very useful and I like so much the way I can store almost everything using an SD card and a MMC card too.
It’s very thin (0.8 mm) and very lightweight. I absolutely love it. It worth all the 299 euros I paid on eBay.
Probably I would buy another one for my girlfriend too.
what other products did you look at? I know amazon introduced an interesting product a few months ago too.
Keith Foster
April 17, 2008 at 9:46 pm
Hey Keith, how are you???
Yes, the Amazon Kindle was released months ago, but I preferred the Sony one because:
- I can read even non-DRM content
- I don’t have to pay for downloading blog RSSs
- It is thiner
- It is more lightweight
- I need a portable device, not something that will waste 5 CMs height because of a keyboard that I don’t know exactly how I’ll use
I was going to take the Cybook Gen3, but the sony inspired me more.
PS: do you have a personal blog link, so I can insert it in my Links?
Thanks,
Enrico
Enrico Foschi
April 18, 2008 at 8:16 am
Hey Enrico,
Nice review.
It is something that I might look into myself in the near future. I will probably wait to see what applications are released for the iPod Touch first though.
blog.keithfoster,info is Keith’s blog URL
Cormac
April 18, 2008 at 3:40 pm
how good is the battery life on it, and can it display picture as well? Since i am thinking about buying one.
Alex, Tucson Web Design
July 7, 2008 at 4:48 am
Well actually I charge the battery every month and I use it about 2 / 3 hours per day. The autonomy decrease significantly when you turn pages, not when you view them (there is no back-light). Sony states it supports about 7000 page views, I’d rather say 4000, but anyway is enough for me.
Yes, it supports pictures as well, but remember that the display is grayscale (8 colors) and has been designed mainly for ebooks (pictures takes sometimes some seconds to load).
Enrico Foschi
July 7, 2008 at 7:24 am
Hello. Useful information, thanks for posting!
If you are going to buy another one… what if it will be another model to make interesting copmpare after.
dbReader
April 18, 2009 at 5:47 pm