The Good:
Sleek, light and highly portable in a leatherette binder, with excellent storage for a number of books.The Bad:
A retrograde grey-on-grey display; the price.The Verdict:
The best e-book reader yet, but it has a way to go before it can match real books.
The arrival of a new generation of e-book readers in Canada, led by the Sony Reader PRS 505, is a story that suggests we're nearing a peak of technological development. Does it mean e-book manufacturers will finally realize their dream of the past dozen years or so?
Technologically, perhaps. The Sony Reader PRS 505 is, compared to most of its competitors, small, capable of storing whole libraries, thin (15 mm, including its soft front and back leather-like covers), light enough (337 grams) to hold for a long period of time without fatigue, and ultimately really cool-looking. And the number of books being released is growing every day.
In short, wow.
But it still doesn't supersede or even match the experience of reading a traditional book. In fact, it can be argued that technologically, the PRS 505 and all digital readers are still far behind the technology that has been stuffed into books made from paper since Gutenberg turned the crank on his press in 1454. Although Gutenberg never used semiconductors, an awful lot of very real technology has been poured into books during the half-millennium before the digital revolution.
Advancements in book technology include binding, glue and typography, an artistic/technical undertaking that computer manufacturers are just beginning to glimpse. Page and type sizes have subtleties most makers of digital counterparts have yet to imagine. Everything in a book, from its type and layout to the thickness of its pages, has been carefully orchestrated to deliver the optimal reading experience for its intended audience. Readers of thrillers and romance novels, for instance, like their books big, so publishers “bulk up” the product with heavier paper, larger type and heftier price tags. Bible and guide-book readers prefer small type and thin pages, perhaps to carry them around more easily. People who read in bed or in the bathtub prefer small paperbacks, easier to hold when supine.
The point is that digital E-book readers have yet to demonstrate much comprehension of the less obvious or subliminal features that have characterized paper-based books for centuries. But many of these readers seem to have been designed by people who understand books only as text. As a result, readers — and this includes the otherwise wonderful Sony PRS 505 — seem to have been created with only one idea in mind: deliver text digitally.
That said, it's hard to imagine much in Sony's reader that can be improved technologically. The $299 device offers text in a decent serif font that can be adjusted to three sizes; its rechargeable lithium-ion battery will last over 7,500 pages, and it can store and display documents in PDF format and Rich Text, as well as digital pictures. It can hold about 160 average e-books, and has two slots for e-books on memory cards, including Memory Stick Duo and SD, for a total of 10 gigabytes of extra content. It can be charged using a simple USB cable, like a BlackBerry; the cable also serves as a connection to the accompanying software, used by your computer to buy books. (Sadly, Macintosh users are out of luck here.) Charging with the USB cable takes about four hours; it will take two with an optional AC power adapter.
When it comes to researching ergonomics, Sony seems to have done a good amount of homework. Ten buttons down the right side serve as menu selectors for different titles or documents in your collection, and two page-back and page-forward buttons are located on the right edge. Controls at the bottom include a left-hand page-turning control, along with buttons to magnify text and insert a book mark; the right side offers a navigation wheel much like those found on MP3 players, and a menu button.
