TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Two weeks with a Sony PRS-700: Unexpected uses and a disappointing discovery

By Chris Meadows

I am in St. Louis this weekend, along with my parents, for a visit to my brother, sister-in-law, and four nieces and nephews. I am away from my own desktop computer, and am having to make do with a slightly flaky Ubuntu laptop—and do not quite have either the energy or the facilities to write the in-depth examination of how the PRS-700 deals with different e-book formats that I had intended.

However, I have brought along the PRS-700 (as well as my iPod Touch) and have observed a few possibly-unexpected uses of the Sony Reader—and another flaw or two—along the way.

(Update: See update to this article at the end.)

Display in Sunlight

First, an amendment to my prior entry, in which I talked about how the glare-prone, low-contrast, unevenly-backlit screen of the PRS-700 was harder to read than my high-contrast, well-lit iPod Touch’s screen. I have since discovered one important exception to this rule: direct sunlight. In direct sunlight that entirely washes out the iPod Touch’s screen, the E-ink screen of the PRS-700 is as clear as day.

Of course, how important this is to you as a reader depends on how often you would expect to be reading in direct sunlight. I try to avoid situations where I would have to read in direct sun, so it might not be as useful to me as to someone who was out in the sun all the time.

Photo Viewing with Expansion Cards

The PRS-700 features both an SD (MMC) card slot and a Memory Stick slot. Presumably these are meant to be used to store additional e-books. However, as I discovered on this trip, they have another useful function.

I have with me my Kodak digital camera, which stores pictures onto a 1-gig SD card. On a whim, I took the card out and slotted it into the PRS-700—and I was able to view every photo I had taken so far on this trip. They appear in grayscale, in very low resolution at first—then after about ten seconds, the 700 adjusts and shows them in full resolution. The view is surprisingly crisp.

Yesterday, I was at a birthday party for one of my nieces at a water park, sitting on a chaise lounge near the pool, and the concession stand was at the other end of the park. My sister-in-law took my camera to the concession stand, took photos of the menu, and came back to me. I put the card into the PRS-700 and was able to read the menus that way and send her back with my order.

Presumably, this would also have worked even if I had a Sony camera like my parents’, which stores photos on a Sony Memory Stick.

Loading by Laptop

Even away from my desktop, I discovered I am not incapable of loading e-books into my device. I loaded Calibre onto my laptop (all I had to do was fetch it using apt-get) and was able to convert and load books. (Oddly, Calibre was unable to detect the PRS-700 again after the first time I plugged and unplugged it; in fact, an error message advised me to reboot. Reboot a Linux box? I think not!)

But as I discovered with the file navigator, if I have the book converted already I do not necessarily even need Calibre to install it—the Sony acts like an external hard drive when plugged in, so I would just need to put the book in the database/media/books directory on it.

The Winter of Dis-Contents

I attended church today with my parents and my brother’s family. As is my wont, I located a couple of free e-Bibles and stuck them on the Sony, so I would have an excuse to be seen reading from it.

The exercise of trying to look up verse citations called my attention to a shortcoming of the 700 that I had not noticed as much before: the lack of a "table of contents" function.

In eReader and Stanza, there is a "table of contents" function that I can use to pull up a table of contents from anywhree in the book. This is especially useful for large reference books such as the Bible, where I might need to access any chapter at any time. But if there is such a thing in the Sony PRS-700, I have not been able to find it. (I will consult the manual again when I get home just in case I might have missed it.)

This means that the only way to find a given book of the Bible is to hop back to the beginning and go to the Table of Contents there—if the book even has a table of contents. (The King James Bible I downloaded did not.) This is a disappointing oversight in a device that is otherwise pretty well-organized for reading.

Update: As one of the comments below suggested, I checked the “Options” menu and there it was: Table of Contents. I suppose I missed it because I don’t think of a table of contents as an “option” or in any way “optional” at all. And both Stanza and eReader offer immediate access to the TOC via an icon at the bottom of the screen instead of hiding it under a submenu.

My next column should cover how the PRS-700 does at reading different e-book formats—particularly PDFs. Look for it Tuesday.