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Sony PRS-300: Not for THIS guy’s pocket
August 30, 2009 | 10:28 am
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By David Rothman
The $199 Sony Pocket Edition, aka the PRS-300 e-reader, gets a big knock from Mike Cane, who briefly tested one at a New York store.
From the page-changing speed to the “nauseating, vulgar pink” of the unit he tried, Mike wasn’t happy, at least not for the most part.
Sampled a PRS-300 yourself—whatever the color? Share your thoughts. No, the photo to the left isn’t of the reader that Mike tested and hated.
Related: Mike’s observations on borrowing e-books from the New York Public Library, which, like many, uses the OverDrive service. Agree or not?
Although many librarians are happy with OverDrive, I myself think the browsing and borrowing experiences could be much easier. If Sony’s forthcoming wireless model will work with OverDrive and other library services, that could help a lot. The smart thing to do would be for Sony and OverDrive to include library wireless ASAP.
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Comments:
Although, frankly, I prefer my Kindle to my 505, my biggest complaint with the Sony system is their online bookstore. First, the checkout, although it offers a “continue shopping” option, doesn’t let one compile all purchases before completing the transaction. Nor does it, apparently, provide receipts. At least, all I’ve ever gotten was a thank-you email with no financial information included. As a result, I have to either jot down each transaction and add them up myself or just wait till the charges hit my account.
On the plus side, the Mac version of the library software performed flawlessly–better, in fact, than the Windows version. Granted, I haven’t tried to use it with Adobe Digital yet. I usually avoid AD whenever possible.
ADE is horrid, Liz. Totally agree with you about that. Own a 505 myself. Not bad as far as E Ink machines go, but I wish the page changing mechanism were better. David
The Sony bookstore uses a regular cart system like most other online retailers (iTunes, etc). I’ve been using the Sony store for years and have never used the “buy now” style for shopping, I have it set to use a cart. If you don’t like one-click purchasing, you aren’t obligated to use it. If you go to “my account” there’s an option to turn “buy now” purchasing off.
Also, from the “my account” page you can view receipts for past transactions. It shows a list of purchased books and their prices, as well as a line item for what your card was charged per transaction. I do agree that it’s annoying not to get this info in the confirmation email, but perhaps they decided this way was more private.
As for Mike Cane’s assessment of the PRS-300, for years he’s been unhappy with dedicated readers, and I’ve never seen him give a positive review of one. I’m also not surprised that he would criticize the quality of the product as a whole because he wasn’t happy with the choice of color for the display model. That’s like saying you won’t buy a car because they only had a green one to test-drive and you wanted to buy it in black.
I spent a fair bit of time looking at Mike Cane’s blog… he has some interesting ideas, but frankly, I am not sure there is nearly as much market for metadata in fiction ebooks as he thinks there is. On the flip side, I do think there is quite a bit of a market for metadata in nonfiction books.
The biggest limitation that I think he will find is that as programs get smarter, even meta data is going to get hard to keep as a commodity… computers will be able to mine the data themselves without any help from a publisher.
In any case, I agree with Kerry’s assessment of his PRS-300 review… he is pretty much philosophically opposed from dedicated devices so it stands to reason he is not going to like any dedicated devices. Personally I think he misses the pleasures of a good old fashioned book on an ebook reader.
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Bill
>>>As for Mike Cane’s assessment of the PRS-300, for years he’s been unhappy with dedicated readers, and I’ve never seen him give a positive review of one.
Um, I’ve never reviewed a single one of them. The post did not say “review,” did it? And I’ve been a big supporter of the Sony Reader until recently.
My ancient (hah!) Sony PRS-500 bit the dust last week, and so I hauled off to Madison Avenue’s Sony Style to get the PRS-300. Honestly, I’m impressed. Better page clarity, lightweight, genuinely pocket sized. In retrospect, I’m glad I kept all of my reading matter (thanks to manybooks.net and other sites) on an SD card. I just popped the card reader into my PC’s USB slot, hooked up the PRS-300 to the other USB slot, and shoved everything onto the PRS-300 flash drive style.
Only complaints:
1) no sd card slot. So, if this one dies, I’d better have backups handy.
2) no attached folding cover. I did like that about the PRS-500, although the cover was starting to get tattered.
3) why anyone would want a color other than black is beyond my understanding. Thankfully, black was easily obtained, our blogger’s experiences notwithstanding…
PRS-300 looks as a good choice, comparing the price of competition. Pity it does not have support for expansion and dictionary. Still, market of e-readers is far from maturity.
any you guys experience the prs 300 freezing or getting stuck? tried turning it off, resetting, changing turning page nothing seems to happen only unfreezes itself after some time. I got this from 3 of my pdf file so far. anything i should watch out so that it won’t get stuck again?