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New Tech for Old Habits
Mar. 17th, 2008 11:27 amI wrote in this journal last November about my reactions to the Amazon Kindle and my general feelings about the current spate of ebook readers. i mentioned in that post that I had not yet checked out the latest generation of the Sony Reader, the PRS-505. Well, this past weekend, while at Fry’s Electronics in Woodland Hills (oh, cursed place) looking for a couple of books on CSS and the Joomla Content Management System (which is a whole different saga about which I may write at some future date), I wandered past the kiosk where they were displaying several of the latest Sony products, including the latest Reader. I made the mistake of stopping to check it out. It’s very thin (about .25“ or 6.3mm), fairly light, and the controls, unlike those on the Kindle, fall pretty naturally under where I normally rest my thumbs when holding a book. The display (based on E-Ink’s Viz-Plex imaging film like almost every other ebook reader) is very readable under almost any lighting where you could read a regular book. It’s not quite paper-white background, more a light gray, but has ample contrast. The type is very tight and clean with its 161 dpi resolution. And since the E-Ink display only uses electricity when you’re changing pages and none to keep displaying a page once it’s loaded, the internal lithium-ion battery only needs charging a couple of times of month at best.
i was impressed enough that I ended up taking one home with me. Even though the accompanying software is still Windows only (and, according to some things I’ve found online, Sony has no plans to develop Mac compatibility), I had figured that I could just install VMWare’s Fusion on my MacBook Pro and run XP in virtualization. As it turns out, I would only need to do that if I wanted to use the Sony store to buy their overpriced DRM-laden books, since someone has already created a free, open source, cross-platform solution for managing the reader and its library (called libprs500, which is a typical OSS-type name, giving virtually no clues about what it is the program actually does), including conversion routines to take many filetypes to the Reader’s native .lrf format. Since I agree with Cory Doctorow, John Scalzi, Charlie Stross, Baen Books, and Tor Books about the senseless and counter-productive nature of DRM on e-books, I’m fine with that and promptly downloaded and installed the program. I already have a large library of PDF ebooks, mostly purchased from Fictionwise, and i wasted no time in starting to load these into the Reader, as it natively understands PDF, as well as html, txt, and rtf documents. Which is where I discovered that PDFs formatted for larger page sizes than the Reader’s approx. 3x5” display may display cleanly, but the font size is a tad small for easy reading. There are three solutions to this: use the magnify button to bump it up a couple of sizes, use the conversion routines in the libprs500 software to change the PDF to .lrf, or use Acrobat Pro to reformat the whole document to the 3x5“ page size. I used the second option to convert the free ebook version of John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War that’s part of Tor’s current ”Watch the Skies“ promotion and read it through yesterday (somehow, I’d never gotten around to it before. Good book! I’m now looking forward to reading The Ghost Brigades and The Last Colony). There were a handful of conversion glitches, and I intend to see how the convert via Acrobat Pro option works when I get home tonight, but overall, after a very brief period of adjustment, it simply felt like reading a book. Since my current subscriptions to F&SF, Analog, and Asimov’s are all e-subs in PDF, the Reader looks like a good way to stay caught up with them without having to carry the laptop around when I’m reading. I notice that Interzone now has PDF versions available via subscription, too, and at $20/year, which is substantially less than the print subscription,mailed from the UK, costs.
So, to sum up, the Sony Reader works for me. It’s as readable as a paperback, as easy to carry around as one, stores up to 160 books in its built-in memory, and can expand via SD card or Sony memory stock to hold a couple of thousand more. Oh yeah, it doubles as an MP3 player, too. While I’m sure that in a couple more years, there will be even more bells and whistles available at a cheaper price, for the moment, this gives me a whole library I can fit in my pocket and read when and where I want, and that’s all i’ve ever really wanted in an ebook reader.
i was impressed enough that I ended up taking one home with me. Even though the accompanying software is still Windows only (and, according to some things I’ve found online, Sony has no plans to develop Mac compatibility), I had figured that I could just install VMWare’s Fusion on my MacBook Pro and run XP in virtualization. As it turns out, I would only need to do that if I wanted to use the Sony store to buy their overpriced DRM-laden books, since someone has already created a free, open source, cross-platform solution for managing the reader and its library (called libprs500, which is a typical OSS-type name, giving virtually no clues about what it is the program actually does), including conversion routines to take many filetypes to the Reader’s native .lrf format. Since I agree with Cory Doctorow, John Scalzi, Charlie Stross, Baen Books, and Tor Books about the senseless and counter-productive nature of DRM on e-books, I’m fine with that and promptly downloaded and installed the program. I already have a large library of PDF ebooks, mostly purchased from Fictionwise, and i wasted no time in starting to load these into the Reader, as it natively understands PDF, as well as html, txt, and rtf documents. Which is where I discovered that PDFs formatted for larger page sizes than the Reader’s approx. 3x5” display may display cleanly, but the font size is a tad small for easy reading. There are three solutions to this: use the magnify button to bump it up a couple of sizes, use the conversion routines in the libprs500 software to change the PDF to .lrf, or use Acrobat Pro to reformat the whole document to the 3x5“ page size. I used the second option to convert the free ebook version of John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War that’s part of Tor’s current ”Watch the Skies“ promotion and read it through yesterday (somehow, I’d never gotten around to it before. Good book! I’m now looking forward to reading The Ghost Brigades and The Last Colony). There were a handful of conversion glitches, and I intend to see how the convert via Acrobat Pro option works when I get home tonight, but overall, after a very brief period of adjustment, it simply felt like reading a book. Since my current subscriptions to F&SF, Analog, and Asimov’s are all e-subs in PDF, the Reader looks like a good way to stay caught up with them without having to carry the laptop around when I’m reading. I notice that Interzone now has PDF versions available via subscription, too, and at $20/year, which is substantially less than the print subscription,mailed from the UK, costs.
So, to sum up, the Sony Reader works for me. It’s as readable as a paperback, as easy to carry around as one, stores up to 160 books in its built-in memory, and can expand via SD card or Sony memory stock to hold a couple of thousand more. Oh yeah, it doubles as an MP3 player, too. While I’m sure that in a couple more years, there will be even more bells and whistles available at a cheaper price, for the moment, this gives me a whole library I can fit in my pocket and read when and where I want, and that’s all i’ve ever really wanted in an ebook reader.