And this bright bundle of glittering generalities does not seem to have helped in the end. Barnes & Noble’s stock was down by as much as 13% after Amazon’s Kindle announcement today, before recovering and finishing at only about 7% down for the day. I imagine any really smart day-traders would have started shorting it last night and stopped a couple hours after the announcement. (Wish I were a smart day-trader.)

The already-embattled bookstore chain really didn’t need this kind of stock hit, but on the other hand it will probably get back some of its own whenever it is ready to announce the new Nooks and Nook Colors it is rumored to have waiting in the wings. But the critical question that B&N, and for that matter Kobo, should be asking themselves is whether they can compete with Amazon on price anymore.

Already I’ve spotted an otherwise-savvy commentator—eBookNewser’s Donna Dilworth—innocently making the apples-to-oranges comparison and wondering whether B&N and Kobo would now have to lower their prices to compete. And that will only be the first of many such comparisons, driven no doubt by Amazon’s own marketing and advertising machine that will be happy to compare Amazon’s “$99 Kindle Touch” to Kobo’s $129 Kobo Touch or B&N’s $139 Nook—when in fact the price of an ad-free Kindle will still be that same $139.

Until and unless they can implement their own “special offers” programs to make up the difference, B&N, Kobo, and for that matter all of the other third-party also-rans like Sony, Astak, etc. are going to be unable to reach the new price goalposts now that Amazon has moved them.

These competitors can certainly try to get the truth out in their own advertising that the Kindle’s price is being subsidized by ads, and that when you compare the ad-free prices they’re the same—but the more complicated the message, the more likely it will go right over the average person’s head. And you just can’t get much simpler than “$79, $99, $149 Kindle,” especially when people who’ve tried them don’t seem to find the ads all that intrusive.

So what will happen? Will competitors find ways to make e-readers cheaper without the ads? Will advertising programs that you pay extra not to have become the default state for all (successful) e-readers? Overall, this simple price emphasis change could have a greater effect on the e-reader market than all the new features and models Amazon introduced combined.

Here’s the Amazon link. Thanks to E-Reader-Info for the heads up.

CNet reports that Scribd has now done so: Scribd-hosted documents can be sent to any of a dozen different e-book devices (including Kindle, Nook, iPhone, Palm, EZReader, and others) with two mouse clicks.

The documents are sent as PDF files via e-mail or SMS message link. At present, only DRM-free titles are supported, but Scribd CEO Trip Adler has plans to expand to copy-protected versions in the future.

Another part of Scribd’s mobile strategy is creating device-specific Scribd reader applications, which will be released later this year. Much as Amazon does with its Kindle Reader app, these will allow readers to download Scribd documents into their device and keep track of where they stopped reading.

The Kindle has finally hit Canada, and it has features the Sony lacks—on-board dictionary (which I would not use when I read in English but would use often when I read in French), on-board Wikipedia and free book samples, a search feature and other goodies.

I have been taking advantage of the facilities at a local community centre, and not being a huge music person, was getting bored with the same 100 or so songs that have been on my iPod for the last decade, so the text to speech feature particularly intrigued me. But what did not intrigue me was the price!

When I learned that the Astak Pocket Pro—$100 cheaper—shared this feature, and furthermore that a local friend had one and was willing to loan it to me—I jumped at the chance to check out the Astak Pocket Pro.

First impressions

The Pocket Pro is an adorable little device. The one I borrowed was blue, and although it suffered from the now apparently fixed peeling paint issue, it was comfortable to hold and considerably lighter than my 505. It had a removeable cover which made it look like a book.

There were numbered buttons at the bottom, a round button to conjure up the menu, side buttons on the left to turn pages, and a jogwheel on the right for the same purpose. I was used to having buttons on the right from my Sony, and my hand kept straying to that area, but after awhile I got used to flipping pages with the jog wheel.

Loading content

The Pocket Pro loads onto the computer as an external drive and you can drag and drop files onto it. You can also use folders to sort the content. The one I was testing had come with a memory card full of free books, some badly formatted, in text and PRC.

Astak’s reader can additionally handle mobipocket, epub, HTML, PDF and other formats. I loaded content onto the memory card in a variety of formats for testing purposes.

The device is also compatible with Calibre. I had it plugged in when I opened Calibre, and after a moment, it appeared as a device and I could transfer content into the main directory. If you want to use the folder navigation though, it’s probably easier to drag and drop files directly where you want them.

The only advantage of Calibre for me was what I had trouble ejecting the device from the desktop (it kept appearing to eject and then popping up again). It seemed to eject better when I chose the ‘eject’ command from within Calibre.

Reading content

I did not find a format for reading content that suited me. Epub from commercial sources displayed the best depending on how it was formatted—one book which was on there when I got it looked great and was fully justified, but one I loaded myself had margins which were far too large.

Epubs I converted myself from other formats were not justified. I also found that epubs I went back to after reading something else did not always open on the page I had left them at. Epub files did have good zoom options with multiple choices, but I did not find a way to set a default zoom. The default it comes with is much too small and I got tired of having to readjust every book one at a time as I opened them.

Mobipocket looked great. I downloaded some of my multiformat reads from Fictionwise in mobipocket format and they were fully justified, navigable via table of contents or hyperlink (if you press the menu button, there are options for both) and were crisp and clean-looking. There were also three font choices, an option that was absent in the epub viewings. However, there was not a zoom option to make the font bigger, and text to speech is not permissable with mobipocket files.

So overall, I found it was a lot less seamless of a reading experience. If it was important that the file look nice, mobipocket was the better choice, but then I couldn’t have it read to me and I couldn’t make the font bigger. If I wanted those options, the file invariably would look choppy and it wouldn’t always remember my page. I think the firmware needs some bug fixing and standardizing of options here. I should have the same options for every format I read.

The software was not the only part that was glitchy. The buttons were not always terribly responsive, and several times, I had to select an option more than once before it registered. I also found that the menu button was terribly placed so that when the cover was closed in my hand, I often would knock it by accident. If text to speech was on, it would then disable, thus defeating the purpose of letting one walk around with the reader and have it recite.

Text to speech

The text to speech feature was the prime selling point of this device for me. I planned to use it during my morning commute and at the gym, which would mean that on a gym day, I could accumulate an extra hour of reading. It was easy enough to turn on and off (a little TOO easy to turn off, as I mentioned!) and, although definitely a tad robotic-sounding, would have been passable for me except for one fatal flaw. It cannot handle apostrophes at all! So, a sentence like ‘it’s not his fault’ would read ‘it tee is not his fault.’

That, on top of the usual text to speech issues common to all such devices (reading of homonyms, pauses in odd places etc.) made this completely unworkable for me. It was better with non-fiction which tends to have fewer contractions as it does not rely as much on colloquial dialogue. But given how often I plan to use this feature, it is worth investing more in the nicer implementation.

My verdict

Sorry, Astak. This strikes me as very much an entry-level gen 1 device. It needs standardized menus and feature sets across all formats for a transparent reading experience; better control over font size, appearance and justification; more responsive and better thought-out navigation options, both on the software and hardware front; and text to speech that is smoother and can handle standard words, including those containing basic punctuation markers such as apostrophes, without choking.

I am buying a Kindle.

Editor’s Note: Ficbot just reported that she got a Kindle through Craigslist and will pick it up tomorrow. I hope we’ll have her review soon. —PB

See also Chris Meadows’s series of reviews of the Astak Pocket Pro. —CM

_____

NPRs Morning Edition has a story on ereaders which you can listen to here.

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Amazon is publishing its best-selling items for 2009 and you can find their bestselling books listed here. You can sort by year, month and week.

—–

ComputerWorld UK publishes an excerpt from a “Reflection Document” from the European Commission entitled “Creative Content in a European Digital Single Market: Challenges for the Future”

Note that with the version of firmware with which the Astak shipped, only PDFs could be read aloud. However, a more recent firmware upgrade expanded speech-compatibility and now it works with ePub too. (And perhaps other formats; I did not check.)

I connected the Astak to my computer and recorded a couple of minutes of the first chapter of Agent of Change by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller. You can download the mp3 here, and follow along with Baen’s sample chapter here.

Taking a Listen

As with the Kindle, the Astak’s text-to-speech mode is not actually meant to help blind readers—it does not have the necessary audio-based interface for such a reader to navigate to the book and start it playing. Instead, it is meant for hands-free operation, such as when driving.

As you can tell, it is not the best way to experience a book. Those publishers who complained and forced Amazon to allow them to disable the feature? If this is an example of the quality in which the Kindle reads, they were overreacting.

You will notice a number of things right away: the way it runs the ends of the first few lines together, and the way “it” at the end of the last sentence in the second paragraph gets pronounced “eye tee”. You may also notice the way it hesitates while switching pages (after the words “left leg, which”—it was read at a different font size from the one shown in the picture).

According to the manual, the jog switch on the right is supposed to adjust the volume level. However, I never could make it work. Not that it was a great hardship for me, since I barely used the feature anyway.

Parting Thoughts

The Astak 5” PocketPro EZReader is better in some ways than the Sony (more readable screen) and about the same to slightly worse in others (its clunky control scheme and problems reading PDFs). It was definitely lighter and easier to hold in one hand, but it also had the issue with its paint starting to peel off.

The lack of support for eReader format was a little frustrating, and was probably one of the big things that would have led me to want to keep it. Since it was not, I will not feel too bad about sending it back.

Even with its flaws, the Astak is still a decent little reader. Those who prefer dedicated readers and e-ink screens can certainly do worse. None of the problems are showstoppers. If I had more disposable income, even with the flaws I probably would go ahead and buy it.

But now it is time to bring this set of reviews to a close and look toward the next reviews I will be doing for TeleRead. Max Seybold, Chairman of CherryPal, will be sending me review units of the Africa and Bing netbooks sold by his company, and I will see what kind of e-book readers they might make.

It is not clear from the article whether he downloaded the PDF or EPUB versions of the books he chose to read. What he writes could be true for either one. (Certainly, from my own observations of the Astak’s performance, the PDF version would not look its best on that 5” screen.)

I was immediately shocked by the quality. Those of us who are a certain age likely remember using micro fiche to do research in the library back in the day. It had the same feel to me.

The cover pages show scan marks and there is scanning "noise" on many pages. It has the library plate from the college library where the book lived. It’s not a great presentation and it’s something that any book publisher with an imagination could produce in much higher quality and take greater advantage of the electronic medium.

I find it hard to disagree with that point of view considering the source material he had to work from. The PDFs are meant to show what the original looked like, not to provide a reformatted e-book version.

And the quality of the EPUB versions is uneven, to say the least. Some of the scans are highly readable; others have OCR errors on every other line. (This is not surprising, given that Google hardly has the time to go through and proof every one of the millions of e-books it scans. Perhaps it could get Distributed Proofing’s help.)

On the other hand, one of the comments below the article notes that Google’s e-book effort is still young, and it is improving day by day. And as Miller notes himself, Google is not really trying to be an e-book provider—it is a search engine and an archive. People are more likely to go to Google Books to examine scanned images of pages from a book than to try to read the whole thing.

So while Miller may claim Google “fails” as an e-book provider, providing e-books is not really Google’s goal in the first place. And who knows—once the litigation is a thing of the past and Google is able to devote its full attention to improving what it already has, it might just surprise some of its critics.

Photo Note:

I’ve had more time to play around with the Astak, and the bloom is off the rose. Yes, the e-ink screen is truly amazing, and far clearer than the touch-sensitive Sony reader’s. However, it has certain other problems.

In Praise of Astak

Before I start talking about the Astak’s shortcomings, I should mention that the company itself has some astoundingly good customer service. For one thing, they monitor the Astak forums on MobileRead and pop up to answer questions.

Whenever I have posted a technical question on the forum, I have almost immediately been emailed by an Astak representative with suggestions and offers of advice. Now, granted, I do not know whether this is their default behavior toward all users, or just because they know I’m reviewing their product. I’d like to think the former is true.

Another nice thing about the device itself is that the firmware is remarkably easy to upgrade. Just put the firmware file on an SD card, slide the card in, and reboot into upgrade mode using a combination of keypresses.

My only complaint in this regard is that the instructions I found for upgrading on their website were not entirely clear. One of the buttons to be pressed is mentioned as the “increase volume key”. I assumed that meant the rocker switch on the right—but after that did not work and I searched some more, I learned that those instructions only applied to the 6” Astak reader devices; for the 5”, you press the page-forward button left of the screen instead. Just a little confusing.

Now let’s talk about some of those shortcomings.

Battery Life

One of the things that makes e-ink so great is that it only uses power when you turn the page. The e-ink page uses micro-capsules that are rotated by current, but require no current to stay set as they are. This is why e-ink readers have such a long battery life.

This should mean that, theoretically, an e-ink reader should use almost no power at all when it is “idling”. I should be able to leave it “open,” like a book, for days on end and pick it up with the same battery level that I left off.

(Granted, there may need to be some minor power consumption—but since it is not driving a display, surely it should use less than a digital watch, which is able to run for months on a single tiny battery.)

Unfortunately, this is not the case with the Astak. If I leave it alone for several days and forget to plug it in, the battery drains completely dry—and requires approximately “overnight” to charge back up to full again. This puts a damper on what ought to be one of an e-ink reader’s biggest advantages.

A Peeling Reader

I also noticed that my sample has started to develop a flaw remarked upon by other Astak users: the peeling paint problem. About half of Astak owners have found that, with a little wear, the paint covering their reader starts to peel off. Here you can see it starting on mine, right around the left page-turn arrows. (You may need to click to enlarge it to see more clearly.)

It is only a cosmetic problem, of course, and Astak’s excellent customer service again comes to the fore: they will, on request, provide replacement units that do not suffer from this flaw. Not everyone even cares about a replacement; one Astak user on the Baen Bar has just peeled all the paint off of his and been quite happy to keep using it that way.

Ex-Calibre

For some reason, I have not been able to make Calibre work with the Astak. I am not sure whether this is the Astak’s problem or some flaw with Calibre (which worked just fine with my Sony).

When I posted to MobileRead about it, it was suggested that I should remove the Chinese language manual from internal memory, as it messes with Calibre’s ability to connect.

I wanted to try to do this, but it seems at the moment I cannot get the reader to connect to my computer’s USB at all. It just shows a “charging” indicator and blinking light, and does not give me a “press Enter to connect” dialogue. But others seem to be able to use Calibre with their devices just fine.

It was not a great handicap, however; I ended up just using an SD card reader to copy my books directly onto my card, which I then put in the Astak. It just takes a few extra steps to make the copy.

If I were going to keep this reader, I might be more concerned about getting Calibre working with it—but since I will be sending it back, I am not going to let it bother me.

Moving on to formats…

Mobipocket vs. ePub

First of all, the majority of the books I read are unencrypted ePub these days, from Baen. I recently downloaded all of my Webscription purchases and put them on a directory of the 2-gig SD card I normally use for my digital camera, and put that in the Astak. The books load right up with no problem.

Reading ePub books on the EZReader is, well, “EZ”. They load quickly, and I am able to access the table of contents, zoom, search, even use the read-aloud feature (once I had updated the firmware to the latest version).

However, a Mobipocket book I read on it did not fare so well. This was 1634: The Baltic War, from one of the Baen CDs hosted on The Fifth Imperium. It was not available in ePub format, so I loaded the Mobi.

I found that, though I was able to read the file, the Astak reader was unable to parse the Mobi table of contents. There was a table of contents I could jump to, but it was all HTML links and I couldn’t figure out how to click on any of those links (if it was even possible at all). I ended up having to use the “jump to page” function in the menu to navigate through the book.

Furthermore, every so often the reader would lose track of my place. I would turn it back on to find myself a few dozen or hundred pages back from where I had been. If I find myself faced with a Mobi-only title in the future (at least while I still have the Astak), I will probably go to the extra trouble to convert it with Calibre first.

eReader and PalmDoc

In email correspondence, Bob Barry, the Director of Global Business Development for Astak, said that the Astak already supports non-DRMed books in Fictionwise’s eReader format, and they are negotiating to add support for eReader DRM as well.

However, I tried testing with three unencrypted eReader books I created myself and that I had verified opened on other devices, and the Astak did not even see them in a directory listing of the SD card. Very disappointing. It appears the Astak may not be the eReader e-reader of my dreams after all.

I was able to open a book in the PalmDoc format, though since it had no table of contents navigation through it would have the same problem as Mobipocket.

Awkward File List Navigation

I should also note that the navigation through the file list is a bit of a pain if you have a large directory. My Baen e-book files take 27 screens to list, alphabetically by title, and there is not any way to jump to specific titles. (Nor can I sort them in any way except title, date, or type, which is not terribly useful in this situation.)

So if I were to want to read Worlds of Honor or Young Miles, I would have to resign myself to paging through 27 pages of files to get to the ones I wanted.

I suppose if I copied my Calibre directory onto the card rather than my unsorted Baen ePub directory I might at least be able to navigate the directory tree by author, but I would still need to know what author wrote the book I wanted.

However, I cannot now remember whether Sony’s file list interface was any better.

PDF

But the PDF format is where the Astak easily falls the shortest. I had expected that, being a more recent device, it should handle PDF files at least as well as the Sony did. (You may wish to read my review of the Sony’s PDF capabilities for comparison purposes.) However, its performance left a number of factors to be desired.

First of all, I loaded the image-only PDF of “Bronte’s Egg”. Full-page, it looked about the same as it did on the Sony, only smaller by an inch. However, when I used the “rotate” option and turned the reader 90 degrees, when I pressed “page forward” the device simply crashed back out to the file list again. I tried multiple times, and it always behaved in this way.

Moving on to Dragon Warriors, we see that in both the portrait and landscape versions, the text looks pretty good. The problem comes when we use the “zoom” function, to break the PDF out of its formatting and zoom the text in a few times. The result: the first column on the page is nowhere to be found. The text below the header starts at the beginning of the second column.

(The Sony was not perfect in this regard either, but at least it put the “Introduction” header at the middle of the page and kept the first column of text before it. But no amount of paging up would reveal that first column of text in the Astak.)

Spycraft, the 160-megabyte overformatted bloat-monster, took more than a little time to load, but once it did it looked fairly decent, if much too small to read. Rotating 90 degrees did improve the readability some—but attempting to zoom in further simply zoomed out instead—and it remained zoomed out through each of the several zoom levels, until I finally reached the one that zoomed it back in to its original half-page view.

Also, zooming, rotating, and page-turning were all extremely sluggish—not that I am surprised, given the 160-megabyte size of this monster.

Spirit of the Century, a much smaller book and less-bloated PDF, came off considerably better. The smaller page size meant it is more readable in general on the Astak, and the non-cruft formatting meant it came off considerably better zoomed in as well.

Tables of Discontent

One other annoyance had to do with the table of contents. The Astak would read the PDF’s table of contents, and this included multi-level TOCs such as the one from Spycraft.

In a multi-level table of contents, if I clicked on “4. Chapter 4: Skills” I would get another table of contents, starting off with “1. Chapter 4: Skills” and then listing subheads for 2, 3, and 4.

So assuming I want to start off at the beginning of Chapter 4, I would click 1 for “1. Chapter 4: Skills”, right? Wrong. Clicking 1 would put me back at the main TOC. To go into the chapter, I would need to click 2 or up for one of the subheads. This is not a very intuitive interface design.

Conclusion

Although ePub files are a joy to read on the Astak, other formats are considerably less so—and the interface makes getting to those files somewhat awkward when I have a lot of them. With that in mind, though I am enjoying using it while I have it, I find I will not regret sending it back when the time comes.

The Screen

First of all, the 800×600-resolution screen. I love the screen. Of course, it is probably the same screen that any non-touch-sensitive e-ink reader has, but compared to the Sony I tested before the difference is like night and day. The touch-sensitive Sony had a huge amount of glare—but on the Astak, the glare is not there.

The words are ink-on-paper clear; if the background is greyer than normal book-quality paper, it is not much darker than the newsprint on which daily papers are printed.

The screen is quite legible for reading, as the photo at left should show. Even (especially) in bright sunlight, it is readable without screen glare. Of course, it does lack the sidelighting of the Sony, but so do “real” books. If reading in the dark was really important to me, I would invest in a clip-on booklight for the snap-on case.

Page-turn time is about comparable to the Sony; it takes a second or two but is not an undue burden (unless you suddenly need to flip back 3 or 4 pages to reread something you missed; then it is a slight hassle but only slight).

Controls

Ergonomically, I like the device for the most part. For example, it has three sets of page-turn controls: the two arrow buttons left of the screen, the “9” and “0” buttons below the screen, and the jog switch to the right of the screen (not visible in the above photo).

This offers a lot of flexibility in ways to hold the device. Since I walk with a cane in my right hand, I find I can hold it in my left and turn pages with my thumb quite easily—more easily, in fact, than I can read and turn pages with my iPod Touch. Also, the reader is small and light enough that holding it in one hand is not an undue strain—unlike the heavier Sony.

However, if I should need to hold it one-handed with my right, turning pages is not so easy. It is possible, if I hold the lower right corner and work the jog dial with my index finger or press the “9” and “0” buttons with my thumb, but is a bit unwieldy. I would have much preferred another set of arrow keys like on the left.

Rotation

Another problem comes in terms of screen rotation. The device only provides the option to rotate in one way: turning the device 90 degrees left. This places the left arrow buttons below the screen, and the ten number keys and menu/escape buttons on the right.

This is obviously meant for right-handed people, because those who hold in their left now have no one-handed page-turn method available to them—but righties can press the “9” and “0” keys with their thumb.

What’s more, the functions of the arrow keys remain the same. So the key which is now on top, and whose arrow points “up,” turns the page forward, and the key whose arrow points “down” turns the page backward. This is somewhat counterintuitive.

I really would prefer an option for rotating 90 degrees right as well as left—but this is just an annoyance, not really a big problem.

Another minor ergonomic annoyance is that there are five font size zoom levels, but they can only be cycled through one way. So if you make the text one size larger than you meant to, it takes four more button presses to move back to the one before.

Slightly User-Unfriendly

The biggest overall problem with the Astak is that it is slightly user-unfriendly. I am one of those people who does not tend to like reading manuals; I want to just grab and go, right out of the gate.

For the most part, this is possible. But there are some things I had to look up in the manual to figure out how to do. (I still haven’t figured out how to adjust the volume when using the text-to-speech feature even with the manual.)

The ten-button-and-menu control scheme is also a touch unwieldy. This is most obvious in the search interface—for lack of a better keyboard, words are spelled out cell-phone-texting style, by pressing each button a set number of times to enter the right letter.

But just reading books is quite easy, once they are loaded. The screen is bright, clear, and legible. This may be the first e-book reader I’ve run across that is actually worth the purchase price, and I suspect I am going to miss it a lot more than the Sony when the time comes to send it back.

In my next post, I will talk about the reading experience of some of the different formats.

But first of all, here is the unboxing video I recorded the other day, in which I take it out of the box and take a first look at it. Enjoy.

Did I ever‽ This will make a great opportunity to compare this competing e-book reader to what I remember of the Sony. With that in mind, I am starting a new series of columns: Two weeks with an Astak 5”.

I actually expect to have this reader longer than two weeks—Paul believed it was mine to keep, though I will try not to get too attached to it just in case—but I think two weeks is an ample time to do all the reviewing I need, and the similar naming will keep the categories together in the list.

(Editor’s note: Chris will honestly review the Astak no matter what happens. But for journalistic reasons, we’ll figure out another way to reward his much-appreciated efforts. – D.R.)

Since I should have the unit before noon tomorrow, I am in much the same situation now as when I wrote this post before receiving the Sony PRS-700. And I find I still feel much the same way.

The Astak is probably not the e-book reader I would buy for myself, if I were buying one myself, due to its lack of wireless connectivity. But on the other hand, if I do get to keep this device, I will absolutely use the hell out of it. There is not anything wrong with e-ink’s legibility, after all, and loading from my computer will not be that great a hardship.

And to be fair, if I disregarded the wireless issue, there is a lot to like about the Astak’s specs.

For starters, it has the same resolution as its 6”-screened brethren, but in a 5” screen. That means the letters should be that much sharper, since there will be more dots per inch. It will have eight greyscale levels, multiple ways of paging down including a scroll wheel, and an SD card slot for external book storage.

Furthermore, the Astak should not have that touch-sensitive screen blur and glare layer that the PRS-700 had. I am looking forward to seeing for myself exactly how clear e-ink can be. And the feature list says that it has text-to-speech capability, at least for un-DRM’d books. It will be interesting to hear how that sounds.

As for file formats, the Astak claims to support “ADE (Adobe Digital Editions), PDF, DOC, RTF, HTML, TXT, MP3, WOL, CHM, RAR, ZIP, FB2, DJVU, EPUB, BMP, JPG, TIF, PNG, GIF, PDB, PPT, LIT.” That’s quite a lot of alphabet soup. (Strangely, under “Features” it lists PRC but not PDB, and under “Specifications” it lists PDB but not PRC. Well, either way they probably just mean Mobipocket.)

The bad news is, it does not support eReader DRM (yet—I see elsewhere that they are working on adding eReader support), which is what a lot of my purchased e-books are in. And it sure isn’t going to support Kindle DRM. But the good news is that most of my other e-books either already are or are convertible to the open formats, so I’m already pretty good to go.

Although I am going to be busy this weekend running an animé and movie screening room at a local gaming convention, I will try to find the time to put it through its paces as soon as I can.

Price on the New Egg site is about $250, which just happens to be the same as for Bookeen’s five-inch model, the Opus, sold elsewhere.

The Astak, more powerful than the same company’s previous five-inch models, comes with a 400Mhz CPU, 512M in memory and a screen with eight-gray scales.

Related: Engadget, E-reader-info, ZDNet review, other TeleRead Astak mentions, and the infamous Astak site, which in places assaults you with garish, Las Vegas-style graphics, including especially obnoxious blinks. Stop it, Astak. Now.

Seeing as I never cottoned to the BeBook, I was skeptical of another Hanlin ereader. But I was quite impressed by the Pocket Pro. Its big advantage is that it doesn’t sacrifice any features of the 6-inch model, except an inch of screen size. It does music, pictures, and SD cards every bit as well as the 6-inch ereaders that cost $100 more.

It has a slightly clunky interface, and a few minor annoyances, but Sony will have its share of little headaches, too, and Astak will definitely be better on customer support.

If you want a cheap, casual ereader, the choice is basically between the PRS-300 and the Pocket Pro (the jetBook enters the picture if you don’t need DRMed ebooks). If you want music, SD cards, text-to-speech, or search—or you don’t trust Sony—the Pocket Pro is definitely the device for you. Otherwise, it comes down to how much you value the interface.

If you want a touchscreen or wireless-enabled ereader, check out our ereader comparison. Personally, I think the more expensive ereaders have significant drawbacks (no library ebooks for Kindle, low contrast for Sony Touch, huge price tag for iRex), so the PRS-300 and the Pocket Pro are the first two I think you should consider.

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ebook readers, ereaders, Paul Biba, Sony, Sony Reader, TeleRead, Astak

… Enter the Sony Reader Pocket Edition PRS-300, Sony’s first 5″ ebook reader. It’s got nearly all the features of the PRS-505 (now discontinued) but it’s 20% smaller and a bit lighter at 7.76 ounces. We showed it around to a few folks and each and every one exlaimed “wow, I could put that in my pocket!”. Looks like Sony got the both the name and size just right for folks who prefer portability over fewer page turns. And at $199, Sony is reaching the sweet spot for a mass market reader.

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e-book, e-books, ebook, ebook readers, ebooks, ereaders, Paul Biba, Sony Reader, TeleRead

Chinese, Japanese and Korean
Font increases of 100%, 200%, 300% and 350%
Support for hyperlinks, additional bookmarking and a new search function.

Nice to see that they are keeping on top of these units.