cowfish

So, I continue my life without papery books. I’ve had my Sony Reader for a few weeks now, and it is still lovely. Since my day one purchase of Anathem and upload of a bunch of classics, I’ve also grabbed Peter Hamilton’s Temporal Void, a pile of Tor short stories, a couple from Bookkake’s collection, Neil Gaiman’s Graveyard Book and my current read, David Peace’s Tokyo Year Zero. I’ve read a few graphic novels on top of those, but in a “must get used to it” kind of way, I’ve stuck to the e-reader for my regular booky needs. So, how did it do?

The hardware is quite excellent. Apart from a few random crashes and some weirdness where it didn’t charge one night when I plugged it in, it has functioned without hitch and I’ve only needed to charge it once since unboxing it, despite it being handed around to everyone I know and playing a couple of episodes of X Minus 1 as a test of its mp3 player. Ergonomically it’s fine, with my main annoyance being that the navigation pad on the right doesn’t change pages, something that would be useful as my main reading position is Jean-Luc Picard style with the coverless pad in my right hand and cup of Tea Earl Grey Hot in my left, while sitting in my ready room (this may be fantasy. I don’t have a ready room. Or any earl grey, hot or otherwise). This doesn’t work that well, leading to my having to change tea hand, which is more traumatising than the words alone might suggest.  The pages turn quickly when you’re using a non-PDF file and aren’t too slow with PDFs unless they are image heavy, and you get used to the flash of the refresh after a bit. You can change the size of the text with all the books that I’ve tried and with PDF files it reflows text quite well, although it still respects page breaks, meaning that you do sometimes end up with overly short pages when a PDF page is split unevenly across an e-reader page turn. The screen is about as reflective as a glossy magazine, maybe slightly less so, so there are occasional glare issues. However, I’ve not had much trouble reading it in a variety of lighting conditions, from on the tube with the sun at my back to the darkened back room of my local. It also gets comments – it’s quite a pretty thing, especially with its tan pleather cover, and I’ve had a few people wander up and ask what it is, how it rates against real book and just share a general appreciation of the shiny thing. I gathered a small crowd of staff in Carluccio’s a few weeks back, all intrigued by the new fangled device…

There are two pieces of software used with the device – the Sony Library and Adobe Digital Editions. The former is as clunky and ugly as Sony’s software always seem to be (my experiences with the NetMD minidisc player’s software have soured me against anything that Sony may shat out onto my PC) and the latter is a Flash based (maybe Air?) lightweight app that does its job efficiently, even if the interface is using the “I am cross platform by virtue of being totally different to all the avalailable platforms” trick that so many seem to try. I used the Sony software for uploading non-DRM’d books to start with, but having found out that I can just dump them on an SD card and have the reader Just Work with them I’ve not loaded it again. Adobe Digital Editions is used for DRM’d books, as in the UK it seems that Adobe’s locked formats are being used rather than Sony’s.

An aside, DRM’d ebook formats: The Sony secure LRF format seems to be a DRM’d version of the open EPub format, as are Adobe Digital Editions, although they don’t seem to be compatible. However, to muddy the waters further, Adobe also do secure PDF, which some sites bill as a Digital Edition, despite it not being a capitalised Digital Edition, merely a digital edition. Luckily the Sony Reader supports both, although in the latter’s case you don’t get the automatic formatting joy that a real EPub document gives you, locking you into the formatting of the PDF, which is generally not designed for the small reader screen. I’ve been looking into what makes up an EPub and behind the scenes it’s just a zip file with a bunch of HTML in. One day my attempt at EBook::EPub might appear on CPAN.

The big question though is how does it read? Answer: a bit like a book. No, it’s not the same. Yes, it still feels a bit weird. But overall it works well, much better than the Palms that I used years back to avoid the wrist snapping weight of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque cycle (note to self – buy the System of The World as an ebook so that you can finish the series, finally). The contrast is not as great as paper, but the resolution seems higher (it’s 170dpi). It handles images well (depending on how the ebook is constructed), with eight shades of grey, and reading The Graveyard Book with the illustrations was a nice surprise, expecting a boring text version as I was. Most of all, I got to read Anathem and The Temporal Void without having to cart around a hefty chunk of dead tree and also have that extra cubic foot of space free in my house, ready to fill with comics, pies or whatever else takes my fancy. I don’t care so much about the carting around of hundreds of books with me at all times, but the small size and fact that it currently contains about a shelf worth of books rather than filling up a shelf makes me a happy man.

Other posts

• Ebooks…again
• Sony Reader: The Movie
• Never judge a reader by the cover of their book