TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘Two weeks with a Sony PRS-700’ Category

By Chris Meadows

Remember when I was at the Harry Potter premiere and I saw people reading Kindles? It happened again.

Today I was getting ready to watch the 70th anniversary High-Definition digital screening of The Wizard of Oz (a movie based on a book that is itself public domain and hence available as an e-book) when I happened to look up and notice a booklight in use in the back row—a booklight that looked very much like it was attached to an e-book reader cover.

So I went on back and talked to the lady, who was named Teresa (or perhaps Theresa—I did not ask how she spelled it), and she showed me her Sony PRS-505 reader. She said she had had it for a couple of years, and was very happy with it. She was a SF and fantasy fan, with titles from Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett, Piers Anthony, and others—as well as some public domain titles from writers such as Charles Dickens (as can be seen in the photo). She said she got most of her books from the Sony store.

I showed her my iPod Touch and Stanza, and she was reasonably impressed. She said she might get an iPhone or iPod Touch someday when she had more money or prices came down. I also gave her my card, and told her about TeleRead.org.

As with the Kindles, I was quite impressed by how clear and legible the e-ink screen was compared to the screen on the PRS-700 I tried out. Clearly, if I wanted to experience the true glories of e-ink, I picked the wrong reader to try.

By Chris Meadows

I just returned from seeing Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince at a 12:05 showing with some friends. (Though, as it happened, I didn’t get to sit with said friends: we thought we were getting there fairly early at 40 minutes before the film started, but it turned out they had been seating for two hours already!)

But I noticed something interesting as I was sidling out to get a water cup from the concession stand: an older couple sitting at the end of the row in front of me. The man had a Kindle; his wife had a Kindle 2. (And, they informed me, if I had been around when their son, who had the aisle seat, was there, that would have made three Kindles in a row!) This was the first chance I had ever seen to take a look at Kindle devices in person.

The couple kindly allowed me to take a closer look at their devices—and while I can’t say I had time for any sort of detailed examination, I was impressed with how much smaller and lighter they seemed than the Sony PRS-700 I had previously examined (though I suspect if I placed them side by side, they would be overall about the same size), and how much clearer their e-ink screens were.

They said they had examined the Sony, but had not been impressed by its features compared to the Kindle. The thing they liked the most, the man said, was the battery life—with the wireless off, they could go a week without recharging. As for what they were reading, the woman was reading Dragondrums by Anne McCaffrey (one of my own favorite novels in the Pern series), and the man was reading one of the Wheel of Time books.

Not being iPhone owners, they were not aware of the iPhone Kindle reader app, but were interested when I described the way it would allow picking up on one device from where reading was left off on the other.

I can’t help but find it ironic that the first time I actually came across a Kindle in person—in fact, two different Kindles in person—was at a Harry Potter movie, given Rowling’s piracy-driven opposition to releasing the Potter novels electronically. (Not that this has done anything to prevent or even slow the piracy of said books, which were circulating complete on peer-to-peer within hours of their print releases.)

By Chris Meadows

And now I come to the end of my two-week experiment with the Sony Reader PRS-700. It’s been interesting, and I’ll have some last thoughts on the whole experience after the jump. But as I was getting ready to package the device up, I realized there was one last function that I hadn’t tested yet: how it played audio.

Audio

The device came pre-loaded with two piano jazz MP3s by Jun-ichi Nagahara, so I plugged in my earphones and listened through them. The control scheme was simple enough: a pause button, a slider showing how far through an audio file one is, and the page-turn gestures or buttons to flip forward or backward.

The sound quality was pretty good, though I would expect it to be on a device costing $400 suggested retail. Presumably you would use this to play audiobooks, thus making the 700 a “device for all seasons.”

However, devices that just play audio and are about the size of your thumb are getting less and less expensive all the time, and I have a hard time seeing many people using a device the size of a trade-paperback to listen to audio regularly instead of one of those.

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By Chris Meadows

I have always been skeptical of the idea of PDFs as an “e-book” format.

The PDF format is a queer beastie. It was intended to present a book with strict formatting intact, so that the book could be printed directly without the user needing to format it himself. What the book looks like on the screen is what it looks like when printed.

Hence, PDFs are not really “e-books” so much as they are “dehydrated p-books”. Just add water—or in this case, paper and ink.

Because most PDFs are in the portrait, 8.5” x 11” orientation, they are not the best format for reading on a landscape-oriented computer screen. However, by dint of wide use, PDF has become a sort of de facto “e-book” standard—especially in the role-playing game market, where publishers use it to offload printing costs of marginal titles onto the consumer.

The PRS-700, unlike most computer monitors, has a portrait orientation, so it should theoretically be better-suited to reading PDFs. The question is whether or not it really is.

The answer, it turns out, is a qualified “sort of”. (As always, click on the pictures for a closer view.)

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By Chris Meadows

Here is a video demonstration of how the Sony PRS-700 does at reading e-books and showing photos. You won’t be able to see it in the full quality that it has in person, of course, but at least the footage should give you some idea of how it behaves.

By Chris Meadows

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.

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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.

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By Chris Meadows

In this entry, I’m taking a closer look at what the device is like: what are its ergonomic factors, and how is the display? (As usual, click on any picture to see it full-size.)

Ergonomics

We’ll start with an ergonomic overview. The screen itself is about the size of a paperback book page, with a resolution of 800 vertical by 600 horizontal—167 pixels per inch, just slightly more than the iPhone’s 160 ppi density, or twice-and-change an ordinary monitor’s 72 pixels per inch. It’s not quite enough dots per inch to look just like a real printed sheet of paper (you would want to get into the 300 DPI range for that), but it’s enough to make nice fonts that don’t look completely horrible.

The tablet is pretty thin. All told, it’s about a centimeter thick, the same thickness that my Contour plastic case makes my iPod Touch. The left edge is curved outward, kind of like a book spine, and the right edge is beveled to suggest the curvature of the paper pages on a  hardcover  book with a curved spine. Cute little psychological touch, I suppose.

(Note: The above photo is only meant to show relative scale. It was taken using a flash, and ends up making the 700 look bright and the iPod Touch look washed out. In actuality, the Touch is a good deal brighter.)

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By Chris Meadows

I have just spent a day trying various different types of e-books with the PRS-700 that Sony has loaned me for the next two weeks. By and large, it has been an interesting experience, and I’m starting to see a lot about the advantages and disadvantages of e-ink. It’s been interesting.

In this post, I will cover the installation process, and take a brief look at two conduits—the included Library and the open-source Calibre. Future posts will include some photographic comparisons between the 700 and other readers I have been using.

Quick Start

I guess that someone at Sony had the idea of giving the user a convenient “road map” to how to get started with the device. This thing was huge! Luckily I managed to get it all folded back up again after I had examined it.

The setup process was generally intuitive, at least to someone who has connected as much stuff to his computer as I have. I only ended up needing to consult it after installation to figure out how to move books to the Reader using the Library application. Since then, I haven’t consulted either the quick start guide or the manual (though I do have that on the device itself).

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By Chris Meadows

I received the device today, and have unboxed it. Thanks to my webcam, I now share the unboxing process with you.

By Chris Meadows

FedEx has informed me that my Sony PRS-700 Reader will arrive tomorrow before 10:30 a.m. I get to keep it for two weeks, officially starting Thursday but I’m not complaining about having an extra day to get the jump on things.

I thought that, in the interest of chronicling my experiences, I would sit down and write down the preconceptions I come to this trial period with, so that I can look back in two weeks and see how much they have been changed by spending time with the thing. So, here are my uninformed impressions.

Sony has offered me a generous discount at the end of the fortnight if I want to buy the Sony Reader from them once I’m done reviewing it. At this point, I don’t think I will. Even if I had a steady job right now and could afford the expenditure, based on what I have seen on the MobileRead wiki the Sony would not be the dedicated reader I would choose. There are two major reasons for this.

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