TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

A reader’s review of the Sony PRS-300

By a TeleRead Contributor

Editor’s Note: Many thanks to Nathan Groezinger for a first rate review. Nathan can be found at The EBook Reader.com and you can find otherSony reviews on the site here. Paul Biba

I have seen the future, and it’s all so obvious now.

Most people will own various dedicated reading devices—some small and portable for casual reading and others thin and flexible like paper for large periodicals—all capable of holding tens of thousands of books, textbooks, newspapers, and magazines. All this reading material will be wirelessly and instantly available to anyone owning such a device. Paper books will gather layer upon layer of dust, rendered useless, and bookcases will serve as clothes hangers and storage bins. Paper mills will be sold to the government and relegated to printing more stimulus money. Librarians will wander the streets, lost and confused.

While that future is still a ways off, there are a plethora of new dedicated reading devices coming onto the market in the coming months. Sony has been making e-book readers since 2003, and the PRS-300 Pocket Edition is their first attempt at a 5-inch e-book reader. One of the smallest e-readers on the market, it is 6.2” x 4.2” x 0.4” and weighs just 7.76 ounces.

The PRS-300 went on sale on August 25th for $199, the lowest price for a dedicated e-book reader to date. To accommodate such a low price the Pocket Edition lacks many features that other Sony Readers offer, but it’s not without its own merits.

Features

In contrast to the PRS-600, the PRS-300 doesn’t have a touchscreen, memory card slots, audio or image support, built-in dictionary, on-screen keyboard, or any way to add notes or drawings to a document or e-book. The Pocket Edition is slower to load and turn pages, and doesn’t offer as many settings or options to choose from.

All that aside, the Sony PRS-300 is an e-book reader designed specifically to read e-books. And at that it does its job quite well. The small device seems to fit perfectly between your thumb and forefinger, and your thumb naturally sits over the navigation wheel for easy page-turning with either hand.

After you start to read, the Sony PRS-300 is good at becoming invisible. Its weight is well balance and more comfortable to hold than 6-inch readers. The text is hypnotizingly crisp. The reader disappears as you get into the flow of a story; you forget you’re not reading a real book. Just tighten your thumb to turn the page. The buttons have just the right firmness too, and the lag between pages isn’t an issue at all, although it is slower than the PRS-600.

The Pocket Edition has three font sizes, and allows for viewing in both portrait and landscape modes. Holding down the Zoom button changes the orientation. The problem, however, with landscape mode on a 5-inch reader is that very few lines appear on the screen, even on the smallest text size. You’ll only get 10 or 11 lines with about 7 words per line. It works better with PDF, showing about half a page, but the text is so small you can barely read it. If you jump to medium font size with PDF you’ll get around 12-15 lines per page in landscape mode, depending on the particular PDF. In portrait mode, PDF e-books generally display the entire page on the screen, which is too small to read, but on the medium Zoom setting the text is comparable to the small setting on EPUB and BBEB e-books, which looks great.

You can bookmark pages and then access them in the options menu. For quicker navigation you can view a book’s table of contents or quickly jump to other pages by using the side buttons. Books are sorted by title, author, and date, as well as customizable collections.

With a smaller 5-inch screen there are more pages to turn. Here’s an example of page length differences: a paperback novel that is 576 pages long equates to about 628 pages on a 6-inch reader and roughly 933 pages on a 5-inch reader, with both on the smallest font setting.

Electronic paper is very efficient, so the battery lasts for 6800-7500 page-turns, or about two weeks of regular reading. You charge the battery by connecting the device to your computer with a USB cable, which is included in the box, along with a protective neoprene sleeve and quick start guide. It doesn’t come with an AC adapter but you can buy one if you need to or use a PSP charger. Charging takes 2-4 hours.

The Sony PRS-300 has 512 MB of internal memory that will hold about 350 e-books. It supports non-DRM and DRM-protected EPUB, PDF, and BBEB formats, as well as unencrypted TXT, RTF, and Word files. Word files get converted to RTF when you upload them to the reader, as long you have Word installed on your computer.

Will the PRS-300 display PDF files?

The PRS-300 works perfectly well for PDF files, both secured and unsecured, provided they aren’t full of complicated graphs and images; a device this size shouldn’t be used as a hardcore PDF viewer, the PRS-600 and Kindle DX are much better for that. The Sony PRS-300 is an e-book reader at heart, so if your PDFs are basically e-books they should be perfectly readable on medium Zoom. All the PDF e-books that I’ve tried work well, with the exception of one that ended up having text that wasn’t very dark. I converted this one to EPUB with Calibre and that corrected the problem.
The readability and formatting of all e-books, and PDFs especially, greatly depends on where you download them from and how the original is formatted, so results will vary.

Content for Sony Readers

You transfer e-books to the PRS-300 using Sony’s free eBook Library software, which is now compatible with both PC and Mac computers. Sony has about 100,000 titles to choose from on their website. New releases and bestsellers are $9.99, the same as competitors. Newspaper and magazine subscriptions should be arriving by the end of the year. Sony also boasts over 1 million free public domain e-books through Google (granted 99% aren’t worth reading, but there are still a number of quality classics that are enjoyable).

However, the Sony eBook store isn’t available outside the United States or Canada. If you live in the United Kingdom you still use Sony’s Library Software to manage your e-books, or Adobe Digital Editions, but there isn’t access to the online store. Instead, you purchase books from any independent website that offers EPUB and PDF formats. Sony recommends Waterstone’s, WHSmith, and Borders.

Here are a few more places that sell e-books in formats compatible with Sony Readers: Powell’s Books, BooksOnBoard, eBooks.com, Diesel eBooks, and Fictionwise.

And for the free at heart, here are a few free e-book sites for Sony Readers: Project Gutenberg, Manybooks.net, Feedbooks, and my personal favorite Baen’s Free Library.

Library Books

Another feature, Sony is vaunting their new partnership with OverDrive, which allow users the option to download library books from local libraries. If you have a valid library card you can check out e-books for free, and there’s no late fees; the books automatically expire after a given time (typically 2-3 weeks). This service isn’t available in all areas.

You don’t have to own a Sony Reader to take advantage of this; go directly to OverDrive.com and see if any libraries in your area participate. You can download movies and audiobooks and other forms of digital media too.

Conclusion

The magic of human awareness is the ability to imagine ourselves outside our body, to reach into other worlds and other minds to see and experience wonders and emotions beyond anything we rarely experience in the “real world”. We can enter the unknown, journey to parallel universes, feel empathy and hatred, discover truths and reach higher understanding. We all learn to do this at a young age. Our mind is the key and language is the vehicle.

Language is more than just words, it’s something ingrained deep into the core of our being. And books, organized thoughts arranged with symbols and pictures, take our minds into places where only humans can go, and are confined solely by our imaginations. The mirroring neurons in our brains allow us to experience other people’s stories, to temporarily see and feel what they’re experiencing. We all use our imagination for this, and our imagination is what turns reading into something magical.

Thus, an e-book reader should provide the user with access to quality reading material and should make reading easy and intuitive, like it has always been. While it lacks many features, the Sony PRS-300 Pocket Edition facilitates all this nicely. It is easily portable and fits comfortably in your hand, with a battery that lasts for weeks of reading, and has a wide range of content providers. Once you get started on a good story you won’t even notice that you’ve stepped into the future of reading, a future where dedicated reading devices and electronic books are the norm.