Two Weeks with a Sony PRS-700: Reading ePub and LRF
One of the big tests for the Sony PRS-700, and the thing I’ve been studying the most, is how well it displays the different formats of books it reads.
Over the last few days, I have done more reading than I had done in the previous month, and am ready to make some observations. In this post, I will cover ePub and LRF-formatted books. In the next one, I will look at PDFs.
Note that the comparison photos above and below may not show any of the platforms at its best, due to strange tricks that backlighting and flash photography play on screen appearances. As always, click a photo for a closer view.
ePub/LRF
I have read books in both formats, and not noticed any difference in the way the Reader handles ePub versus LRF-formatted books. From the point of view of the reader, they might as well be the same format.
One font that has ended up in many but not all of my books is familiar to me. I don’t know the name of it, but I would swear that it is the same distinctive font used in the “Choose Your Own Adventure” books back in the 1980s. I don’t have any complaints—it’s a lightly serif, very readable font—but it does occasionally make me think I’m going to run into instructions to turn to a given page if I make a particular choice.
Page turning is, as I mentioned before, done by either using the 2nd and 3rd buttons from the left, or by swiping one’s finger across the page from right to left or left to right. (Who was the bright boy who came up with a page-turning method guaranteed to leave a large smudge on the screen? That’s what I’d like to know.) When the page turns, the screen blinks negative for a moment, then the next page redraws.
Page turn redraw does not take a huge long time, maybe a second in all. I soon got used to it. And if it does take longer than turning the page on an iPhone, you do have to do it less often. It’s just another tradeoff.
How Do They Justify That?
One thing that does annoy me has to do with justification. There is no option that I can find to turn off full justification in the reader itself, as there is in Stanza. If an ePub or LRF book comes fully-justified, then fully-justified it stays. This is not as big a drawback as on the much smaller iPhone or iPod Touch screen, but it does still lead to a few unnaturally-widely-spaced lines here and there (especially on medium-and-up font sizes) and I would be just as happy to do without it.
But it seems that the only way to disable justification is to set the “do not fully justify” option in Calibre when you convert the book from HTML or Mobi. (Oddly, the option does not show up if converting from ePub to ePub or LRF.) This is fine for books that you are converting yourself, but can be highly annoying for the ones you download ready-made.
Indented Servitude
Another problem crops up when using Calibre to convert books from HTML. If you’re not careful, you end up with books that have neither indentation nor space between paragraphs. The books do have the proper indentation in Stanza, but are a real pain to try to read in Adobe Digital Editions or the Reader itself.
The solution is to make sure that “remove space between paragraphs” is checked in the Calibre conversion options. This seems counterintuitive, but though you have to go to the tooltip to see this, that option also adds a paragraph indent so the eye is able to separate one paragraph from another.
It would be nice if this weren’t necessary.
Conclusion
It should be noted that none of the problems I have pointed out above, or in previous postings, have prevented me from reading at least half a dozen complete books in LRF or ePub formats—some that I downloaded from Baen pre-converted, others that I converted myself from HTML or Mobi books—and quite enjoying the experience.
As with any e-reader, the Sony PRS-700 has drawbacks. The iPod Touch has drawbacks; the Palm IIIe, Sony Cliés 415 and 760, and Nokia 770 had drawbacks. That hasn’t kept me from enjoying e-books on all of them.
And as drawbacks go, the PRS-700’s are less crippling than most. Given proper lighting, it’s nearly as good (overall) as the iPod Touch (better in some ways, worse in others). I can already tell I’m going to miss it when it comes time to send it back.
That being said, I’m writing these reviews based not on spending my own hard-earned money on the device, but on getting it for a free two-week loaner from the manufacturer. I still have not changed my mind—this is not the e-book reader I would buy right now, even at the discount Sony is offering me. So take with however much salt you desire.
In my next post in this series, I will look at how the PRS-700 (and other readers like it) may just turn PDF into a “real” e-book format after all.
June 3rd, 2009 at 11:50 am
That’s good to hear… it should be what every reader manufacturer is shooting for, a predictable experience no matter what format you started with.
June 3rd, 2009 at 2:10 pm
Lrf books are faster, epub books are nicer. The differences are not large, but they are noticeable in the long run, on hundreds of books. Also lrf’s are generally uniform in font (though that depends on how you do the conversion I guess), while for epub’s I saw some variation (same comment as above)
I used to prefer lrf’s, but today I kind of take whatever and since I like to have the books simultaneously on the Touch and on the 700, I do not bother that much doing the lrf since I need the epub anyway.
June 3rd, 2009 at 3:47 pm
I’m glad to hear that the PRS-700 was able to handle ePub with ease. That’s a very promising sign. And that’s how ebooks should be for the end-user – no notice of format, just a pleasant reading experience.
Sony is scoring well ahead of Amazon, in my book, precisely because Sony opened up their readers to ePub, while Amazon has not.