Sony Reader

It uses an electronic paper display developed by E Ink Corporation that has 166 dpi resolutions, four levels of grayscale, is viewable in direct sunlight, requires no power to maintain the image, and is usable in portrait or landscape orientation. Like real paper, it may be difficult to read from in low-light conditions, as the unit has no backlight. The reader uses an iTunes Store-like interface to purchase books from Sony Connect eBook store. It also can display Adobe PDFs, ePub format, personal documents, blogs, RSS newsfeeds, JPEGs, and Sony’s proprietary BBeB (”Broadband eBook”) format.

The Sony Reader can play unencrypted MP3 and AAC audio files. It is cousins with the LIBRIé but the Sony Reader offers no way for the user to use a digital book due to lack of a keyboard. The digital rights management rules of the Reader allow any purchased eBook to be read on up to six devices (at least one of those 6 must be a PC). Although you cannot totally share purchased eBooks on other people’s devices and accounts, you will have the opportunity to register five Readers to your account and share your books accordingly.

The Sony Reader competes with other e-paper devices, the Amazon Kindle, iRex iLiad, the Jinke Hanlin eReader, and CyBook by Bookeen. Readers have been on display and for sale at bookstores throughout the US. From April 2007, Sony Reader has been sold in the US by multiple merchants. Sony announced the PRS-505 in 2007, which is an upgraded version of the Reader. The ‘505 keeps the 6″ E-ink display of the original Reader, but uses an improved version of E Ink’s imaging film with faster refresh time, brighter white state, and 8-level grayscale. PRS-505 is thinner than its predecessor (8 mm vs. 13 mm) and comes with more internal memory (256 MB vs. 64 MB).

Other new product features include auto-synchronization to a folder on a host PC, support for the USB Mass Storage Device profile, and full USB charging capability (the PRS-500 could only be recharged via USB if the battery was not fully drained, and if the Sony Connect Reader software was installed on the host PC). Also adding books to “Collections” (a feature to organize and group book titles) is now possible on the storage card, unlike the PRS-500 model.

Typefaces in PDF files formatted for 216 x 280 mm (8.5 x 11 inch) pages may be too small to read comfortably. Such files can be reformatted for the Reader screen size with Adobe Acrobat Professional, but not by Adobe Reader software. The Reader does not directly support Microsoft Word DOC format. The ‘CONNECT Reader’ application uses Word to convert the .DOC files to RTF before sending them to the Reader.