Nick Projects

PRS 505

I have spent several days now with a Sony E-reader that I picked up on Ebay for $200ish.  I went this rout because the kindle is back ordered for another month (at least) also it’s $375.00.  Since I don’t travel constantly and own a computer that stays on all the time I decided that being constantly connected wasn’t a large enough feature to wait for/ pay for.  Also, the sony has a little bit nicer screen and looks quite a bit cooler despite having obviouse limitations.

I really like the device,  I find myself reading quite a bit more because it’s far easier to thumb through 2 or three articles from different magazines on a digital reader than on real paper. Reading books etc is very easy on the eyes and it’s a very comfortable device to use.  I think it is an alright deal around $200,  and a no brainer if anyone can ever drop the price below $100.  I don’t know why no one has released anything with wifi or blue tooth connectivity.  Amazon is going to corner the market with their cell technology just because it updates your news when you wake up.  I mean the feature is inspired but could be accomplished through other methods fairly easily.

thoughts to date:

1. It’s pretty Friggin cool.
   The text looks like text,  that is completely awesome.  It doesn’t hurt your eyes to look at it,  and you can make the font nice and big when your feeling brain dead.
2. Sony Software is completely horrible.
   I mean Sony releases a device in the Post-Kindle era that requires a USB cable to sync.  I can deal with that,  but then their crappy software won’t even update my blogs for me automatically.  What the hell is the point of subscribing to an RSS if it doesn’t update.  Seriously if Sony is going to stay in this game they need to clean that up a lot.
3. Calibre adds some much needed functionality.
   Honestly if you don’t need anything from the sony store,  just don’t bother installing the sony software.  It isn’t worth the disk space.  Calibre on the other hand is great.  It updates blogs it downloads from magazines it’s totally customizable and it’s free.  ( although you should donate to them)  Actually Sony should fund them through their next 3 versions because it’s the only thing that keeps me from re-listing the device back on ebay.  http://calibre.kovidgoyal.net/
4. The device does not work for 8.5 x 11 PDF documents.
   I have an abundance of programming related E-books,  mostly formatted in PDF for 8.5 x 11 paper.  The problem here is that code doesn’t make much sense if it’s badly formatted.  The screen is not large enough to read without zooming,  but once you do… the formatting is hosed.   I’ve had a little success converting files to HTML in acrobat,  but even that has limited usefullness.  In short it’s not going to replace having to tote around that 500 page mysql manual incase you need to look something up.  Unfortunately,  none of the main stream readers will provide this function any better.

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