I’ve been reading Salman Rushdie’s Fury on my new Sony Portable Reader, and I already read a Van Von Hunter Manga title on the Reader. If you haven’t read Fury yet, and you’re a Rushdie fan, I recommend it. I’m only halfway through so far, but it is replete with pop-culture and literary references. Good writing. An interesting story. Van Von Hunter is silly Manga fun.
This is the first electronic device that I’ve ever read text on that actually feels like a book and acts more or less like paper in different lighting conditions. So far, I haven’t seen the battery indicator on the device dip in the least. Reading books designed for the Reader (like those I purchased off of the Sony Connect store) is great, as you can adjust the text size to your liking (small, medium, or large) and everything is formatted nicely with easy to follow pagination at the bottom of the screen. You can even add your own bookmarks on the fly that turn down a little virtual page ear in the top right corner. It reads text and rich text format files easily as well. PDFs work, but unfortunately not quite as smoothly as RTF files; if you’re printing things to PDF, make sure you bold or up the size of the font before putting it on the Reader. I currently have 63 “books” loaded on the device with plenty of room to spare on the 2GB SD Card I have been using for transferring most of the files. There isn’t a Mac solution yet (that I’ve found) for connecting directly to the Reader with a Mac, but the software that came with it runs perfectly fine in Parallels and you can always copy files directly to either an SD card or a Memory Stick.
It can be used as a rudimentary MP3 player / digital audio book player as well, but I haven’t used this feature yet, as I already have an iPod and I’m sure the audio playback eats through the battery.
Basically, so far, I love this thing. It’s my dream book, as it can carry *all* of my books, if I can find them in a digital format. E-paper is amazing. The refresh when you “turn pages” that some people have complained about doesn’t bother me at all. Project Gutenberg has been great for finding books, and I can only hope that more and more book publishers start using the Sony Connect store to publish ebooks of their texts. Here’s one consumer that will buy them if you will. The device feels very solid and the pseudo-leather cover gives it a nice book feel. I could see this device becoming the iPod for books amongst a certain percentage of the population, but I think the price is going to have to come down a bit for it to really take off.
Here are three things needed for the Sony Portable Reader to succeed nicely:
1. A Mac solution for managing the Reader and connecting to the Connect store. Considering all the PSP Mac solutions that came out and were selling for $15-35 after the PSP launched without Mac support, I think this is a market to be filled by enterprising coders out there on the web. Get to it and let me know when you’ve succeeded. I’ll buy your product!
2. A solution on both Mac and PC for converting text files easily into native Reader format. Ideally, this solution will be able to subscribe to RSS feeds and easily convert online writing to Reader format with some sort of easy sync function.
3. A solar-paneled variant of the cover that can be used to charge the Reader via USB. Given such a peripheral, the Reader would be the ideal book to crash on a deserted island with. Considering how little power the Reader consumes, it’s ideal for solar power and I’m surprised Sony didn’t already build this peripheral. Fortunately, this is one that I think I’ll be able to hack together myself with a little bit of work. Stay tuned…
Things I miss when reading on the Reader: I cannot flip quickly ahead to see how many pages remain in a given chapter. I cannot make notes in the margin.
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sounds like a super toy! can you underline words with it or not even that?
Not even that. The most you can mark is via the Bookmark tool.
Hey I just wanted to let you know that I have had my Sony Reader for about a week now and I love it! I am on a Mac, so the lack of Mac software (so far anyway) totally sucks, but since I load my books up on a SD card I have had no problem reading plenty of books.
I also wanted to do a shout out and let you know that manybooks.net is where I have been getting my free gutenburg texts because they actually have them available in “sony reader”format. And they have more modern sci-fi stuff too and free. Sometimes when I take the Gutenburg txt files and copy directly over to the reader, the line spacing is a bit off.
All in all, one of my favorite gadgets ever. I bit pricey but I think it was worth it so far. E-Ink has to be seen to be believed. And I have found so many free books out there (via gutenburg, manybooks.net, etc) that I figure it can pay for itself by the mere fact that I never have to buy a paper book ever.
Now I am just hoping (ok praying) that there will be Mac hacks or Sony comes around and releases Mac software that works with this. Anyway, cool site, cool review. Thanks!
Ive been trying to figure out how to best store text files captured on the web… tried txt, doc and rtf and all about the same.. line breaks appear in middle of text in all formats.. can’t figure out how to eliminate on reader
also i see no advantage to using RFF as suggested by manual.. fonts dont seem to transfer and line break problem persists.
i mean RTF in previous post
There are conversion programs for free to convert RTF into text. At worst, convert it into HTML and then copy/paste it into wordpad.
Increase fonts as desired before saving and transferring over to the reader.
I just got mine and am also using a Mac. Here’s what I did to make the Project Gutenberg text that I’m reading (Dracula) more Sony Reader friendly:
1. Open the .txt file in Smultron (or another text editor that does regular expressions, but these instructions will be for Smultron).
2. Open the advanced find-and-re-place. Uncheck everything except “Use regular expressions,” which must be checked.
3. Tell it to search for \r\n\r\n and re-place it with something unique. I used STEVIE once and PARAGRAPH another time. (Because I told it to not ignore case, these are fairly unlikely to occur in the text.)
4. Tell it to search for just \r and re-place it with a single space.
5. Tell it to search for just \n and re-place it with nothing (the dialog box will ask if you’re sure you want to delete it).
6. Tell it to search and re-place for your unique string from step 3 and re-place it with \r\n\r\n
That basically strips out all of the line breaks that aren’t paragraph breaks. Then when you load the file in your reader, switch between each zoom mode once (which makes it cache optimized versions of the file and makes it much faster to switch zoom modes later) and you’re good to go — no weird line breaks or anything.