And now I come to the end of my two-week experiment with the Sony Reader PRS-700. It’s been interesting, and I’ll have some last thoughts on the whole experience after the jump. But as I was getting ready to package the device up, I realized there was one last function that I hadn’t tested yet: how it played audio. Audio The device came pre-loaded with two piano jazz MP3s by Jun-ichi Nagahara, so I plugged in my earphones and listened through them. The control scheme was simple enough: a pause button, a slider showing how far through an audio file one...

I have always been skeptical of the idea of PDFs as an “e-book” format. The PDF format is a queer beastie. It was intended to present a book with strict formatting intact, so that the book could be printed directly without the user needing to format it himself. What the book looks like on the screen is what it looks like when printed. Hence, PDFs are not really “e-books” so much as they are “dehydrated p-books”. Just add water—or in this case, paper and ink. Because most PDFs are in the portrait, 8.5” x 11” orientation, they are not the best format...

Here is a video demonstration of how the Sony PRS-700 does at reading e-books and showing photos. You won’t be able to see it in the full quality that it has in person, of course, but at least the footage should give you some idea of how it behaves. Technorati Tags: Sony,PRS-700,Sony PRS-700,YouTube,video,e-book,photos...

One of the big tests for the Sony PRS-700, and the thing I’ve been studying the most, is how well it displays the different formats of books it reads. Over the last few days, I have done more reading than I had done in the previous month, and am ready to make some observations. In this post, I will cover ePub and LRF-formatted books. In the next one, I will look at PDFs. Note that the comparison photos above and below may not show any of the platforms at its best, due to strange tricks that backlighting and flash photography play on...

I am in St. Louis this weekend, along with my parents, for a visit to my brother, sister-in-law, and four nieces and nephews. I am away from my own desktop computer, and am having to make do with a slightly flaky Ubuntu laptop---and do not quite have either the energy or the facilities to write the in-depth examination of how the PRS-700 deals with different e-book formats that I had intended. However, I have brought along the PRS-700 (as well as my iPod Touch) and have observed a few possibly-unexpected uses of the Sony Reader---and another flaw or two---along the way. (Update:...

I have just spent a day trying various different types of e-books with the PRS-700 that Sony has loaned me for the next two weeks. By and large, it has been an interesting experience, and I’m starting to see a lot about the advantages and disadvantages of e-ink. It’s been interesting. In this post, I will cover the installation process, and take a brief look at two conduits—the included Library and the open-source Calibre. Future posts will include some photographic comparisons between the 700 and other readers I have been using. Quick Start I guess that someone at Sony had the...

I received the device today, and have unboxed it. Thanks to my webcam, I now share the unboxing process with you. Technorati Tags: unboxing,Sony,Sony Reader,PRS-700,e-book,e-ink...

FedEx has informed me that my Sony PRS-700 Reader will arrive tomorrow before 10:30 a.m. I get to keep it for two weeks, officially starting Thursday but I’m not complaining about having an extra day to get the jump on things. I thought that, in the interest of chronicling my experiences, I would sit down and write down the preconceptions I come to this trial period with, so that I can look back in two weeks and see how much they have been changed by spending time with the thing. So, here are my uninformed impressions. Sony has offered me a generous...