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Sony eBook Reader review

This is not your average eBook reader review; this review is biased towards the survivalist and preparedness geek. There has been discussion on some of the forums (fora?) that I frequent, of using an iPod as a resource for emergencies. Not only can it entertain you with music and now in many cases, video, but it has a notes function. The notes function enables the user to store and read small text files. This can be handy for the survivalist/preparedness geek. Imagine all the instructions, directions, useful texts, lists and tables one can carry. The problem with the iPod is the small screen size and the size limit on the notes which I believe is 4KB on the 5th generation device.

I recently had the good fortune to pick up a Sony PRS505 eBook reader, and I wondered how it would perform instead of an ipod in survival applications. My thoughts and findings are detailed below:

The Sony, like the iPod, is very well made. It comes with a leather sleeve so it looks and feels like a thin book, being about 5×7 inches in size. So this is much larger than an iPod with of course, but the weight is about that of an iPod, perhaps a little more - its not heavy at all. It will fit into a shoulder bag or backpack with ease, and will fit into a cargo pocket, although I’m not sure it is durable enough to be carried that way for any length of time.

Although its quite thin, it feels sturdy and I feel comfortable carrying it in a bag. My only concern here is how it will stand up to getting thrown around in a survival situation.

Its an easy piece of equipment to operate, the controls are few and intuitive, and the buttons feel solid. More importantly for the survivalist, the buttons can be operated with gloves on quite easily. The screen quality is excellent. Its an E-ink type LCD, which gives a great viewing angle, 8 shades of grey and good contrast. It is not back lit so light is needed to read by. The real winner over the iPod though is the screen size - it really is the size of a book and the text size is scalable.

The reader can read a number of file formats; the Sony web site lists;
* DRM Text : BBeB Book (Marlin)
* Image : JPEG, GIF, PNG, and BMP
* Unsecured Audio : MP3 and AAC7
* Unsecured Text : BBeB Book, TXT, RTF, Adobe® PDF10, Microsoft® Word
(Conversion to the Reader-requires Word installed on your PC)

I mainly use plain text files, but on occasions I use RTF files and the reader works flawlessly with these. It will display image files, a function I haven’t used much but could be good for storing maps and the like. I haven’t used it as a music player and have no intentions of doing so. Music playback will drain the battery significantly faster than the normal drain rate.
I don’t use the reader with Word files either, and for a couple of reasons; the first is that the Word files need to be converted by the Sony software, and the Sony software is Windows only. Now I don’t use Windows, I’m a Linux fan myself so I can’t use the Sony Software. Also, word files use a lot of memory space, and although i have plenty I just don’t like to waste it.

Not using the Sony software is ok - the reader looks just like a USB stick as far as the computer is concerned, so just dump your files in there and once disconnected, the reader will do the file indexing itself. This can take a while though, which is why using driver software is preferable. For Linux, Mac and even PC there is a freeware program called Calibre which works really well, and can perform many format conversions.

The Sony will display PDFs but, and its a big but - it can’t scale the files like a true acrobat reader will do. This means the files are almost always unreadable. In addition, it takes a long time to render PDF documents, especially ones with embedded images. I loaded my local tax map, a PDF single image of about 3.5MB. I think it took a good couple of minutes to open and display the file. In fact speed is one thing an eBook reader, any eBook reader, doesn’t have. In order to get the long battery life, speed (and a pretty whizz bang colour display) is sacrificed - no colour and no video capability.

The quality of the text when using plain text, ebook formats or RTF is very good. The text has limited scalability, and excellent clarity. The only annoyance I have found so far is the speed at which the pages turn, there is a slight pause between pressing the button and the text changing and I’ve found that irritating on occasions.

There is plenty of storage space for your files and it is expandable. It has an internal memory of (I think) 256MB. With the gigabytes of hard drive space we are used to seeing now, 256MB doesn’t seem like a lot, but try filling it with plain text files - thats a lot of text. In addition the Sony has SD card and Memory stick slots for expansion. I have a 16GB SD card in mine, so in terms of storage, it is effectively limitless (I use mostly plain text files remember).

Battery life is very good. I get about 2-3 weeks between charges. According to Sony, they state 14 days, reading 300 pages per day and I would say this was about right. The device only really uses power when flicking pages or rendering images. Recharging is simple, and is achieved via a USB interface. If you are on the run, a simple cell phone charger with a 5V USB output will work just fine (its what I use).

Right now I have recipes, fiction, non fiction texts, survival texts, tables and lists on my reader and the amount of files I have on mine keeps growing. I’m not planning to use mine as a survival resource at the moment but I have that option and I know the reader will work well for that role.

The Sony eBook reader is certainly more readable than an ipod, with better file capabilities, and more portable than a laptop computer, with much better battery life.
Its a good compromise solution, at a good price.