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By Joanna

image There is a new e-book reader in the Ficbot house! Devoted TeleRead readers know how in love I am with my iPod Touch, which is a wonderful choice for on-the-go reading. But I am an avid enough reader that I was finding I needed a little more in certain situations:

—The smaller screen is less comfortable to read while I am in motion, for example, when I try to read on the treadmill at the gym

—The iPod Touch can’t handle PDF files, and my public library has just made a small collection of these available for borrowing

—The battery life is adequate for a day or so on the go, but less adequate for longer excursions, and I worried it would fail me on my upcoming five hour plane ride to go see my sister next month

—My eBookwise is starting to show its age, and it’s difficult and cumbersome to get content onto it. It also weighs a million pounds and is a pain to carry around

I found a local buyer who was interested in buying the eBookwise. He had one already and wanted a second one for his wife, so I felt great about selling it to a good home and finally upgrading to something a little nicer. I selected the Sony Reader (505 model) because it was pretty much the only game in town. Since I’m Canadian, the Kindle is not available to me, and I wanted the chance to see and touch it before I bought something like this. So I went to my local Sony store and checked out the situation.

The buying experience

The store had both the 505 and the newer model available. I had been warned that people did mpt like the screen contrast of the 700 as much, and it was $150 more expensive, so I focused my efforts on the 505. I was worried the little flicker as it turns the page would bother me; I tested the sample files loaded onto the reader and found that once I got into a story, I was fine. I also did not notice any appreciable glare on the screen, which was nice. The glare issue was what had killed the Alphasmart Dana as an e-reader for me!

The sales clerk was, to my surprise, reasonably helpful. He answered my few questions easily and seemed to know his product. When I told him I was disappointed this product was not available in bookstores and I had to come all the way downtown to get it, he offered up this bizarre theory that Sony preferred to the lone supplier so that people would think they were the only place to get the books too. I immediately rattled off four other places I planned to get books (Manybooks, Feedbooks, MobileRead and Fictionwise) and he admitted that although he is not supposed to endorse such alternatives, one can indeed get content from whole bunches of places.

One warning about this, though: if you do plan to buy the Sony content, you need to have a Windows PC so you can install and use the included Sony software. I myself am a Mac user and have no plans at all to buy Sony content, so I was unbothered by this restriction and didn’t even look at the cd. But it is an important one for customers to be aware of. As you will see during this review, I had no problems at all finding lots of lovely content and easily—EASILY!—getting it onto the reader. But if you want to use the Sony store, and you are a Mac or Linux user, this will be a problem and might be a deal-breaker for you as far as getting this Reader is concerned.

Questions answered, I was ready to buy. And here is a trick I learned with a previous tech purchase: always ask if they have any opened boxes or returned units available! A brand new 505 was $349 Canadian plus tax. I got $65 off by opting for the opened box model, and I used my feminine wiles (aka ‘asked very sweetly and said I would be blogging this’) to bargain off another $5 on top of that. When I factor in the $50 I will be getting for my eBookwise, that brings my total to a much more reasonable $200 and change. Sony’s usual 1-year warranty also still applies; it may be a ‘used’ unit, but I am buying from them and they’ll cover me in case something happens.

First attempt to use the reader

The reader was already charged when I got it. I am not sure if this is standard operating procedure, or if I lucked out and had the previous owner do the dirty work for me, but I read the manual on the way home and deleted the sample content while I was downloading the free Calibre program, which I intend to use to manage my library and load it onto the Reader.

The delete option was a bit fiddly: you need to open a book, select the ‘options’ command, select the ‘delete’ command, then confirm it by pressing the ‘mark’ button. If you have not read the manual, you may not know which button this is, as the screen only displays the instruction plus a little garbage can picture. It might have been nice for them to include an icon of the ‘mark’ button too! Once I figured it out though, it was easy to delete a book on the go, and I liked that I did not have to return to my computer to do this.

Browsing on the Reader is easy. You can browse by title, author or collection—but you need to set all of this up using your computer (more on this in the next section). When you find a book you want to read, just press the numbered button which is beside it, and it will give you choices to continue reading where you left off, start at the first page, jump to the end, see a table of contents if available, jump to a bookmark, or see other options (among them, the delete option.)

Turning pages is accomplished by pressing on the side arrow buttons. A larger four-way arrow button on the bottom of the reader allows one to navigate through bookmarks, tables of contents or embedded links within the ebook. The ‘enter’ button in the middle of this cluster can also be used in conjunction with the number keys to jump to specific pages.

Using Calibre

image Calibre is a free program which can be used to organize, convert and transfer content onto the Reader. I was told that one could simply drag and drop content onto the Reader too: it shows up as a hard drive when I plug it into my Mac. But I wanted to be able to edit the title information and organize my books into collections, so I downloaded the Calibre software.

One thing I didn’t like about Calibre; it copies all your files into its own directory structure when you load them into your library. I prefer to organize on my own because I use more than one device and not every device uses a file format which is compatible with Calibre (for example, my secure eReader files from Fictionwise could not be imported into this program). The Calibre FAQ says that once you submit to its process, you’ll like it. But I still wish there was an option to turn the file-copying off, and I dislike that Calibre is assuming that it will so meet my needs for everything that I shouldn’t need the choice.

With that said though, it was pretty easy to use and made loading up my Sony fairly painless. I went over to Fictionwise and downloaded the LRF version of all my previous Fictionwise multiformat buys. I then used the ‘edit information’ option to add a tag. Tags are what Calibre uses to create collections. I tagged all of these books ‘Fictionwise’ and when I select that collection on my Reader, I will see only those titles. You can also add more than one tag, so that a book can be part of multiple collections. For example, I have several anthologies which are mystery or sci-fi stories. So I can see them when I browse ‘mystery’ OR when I browse ‘anthology.’ Handy!

Free books are also available from Project Gutenberg, Munseys, Feedbooks, Manybooks and other websites. I was told that some of the formatting on these can be iffy, so I decided to start with the collection over at Mobile Read. This very active message board, blog and forum has a dedicated community of book uploaders who lovingly format (often with illustrations) their favourite public domain works. The LRF section for the Sony Reader has 4000 uploads! I downloaded a few of them just to try and added them to Calibre as well.

When I was ready to put everything onto the Reader, I plugged it into my computer using the included USB cable, and Calibre recognized it after a few seconds. I just highlighted all the titles, clicked the ‘transfer to reader’ button and away they went. A minute later, everything was on the reader and ready to go!

Reading on the Reader

Reading on the Reader is a joy. The screen is clear and sharp looking. I did get a very small glare when I was under very bright direct lighting (e.g. standing underneath a potlight) but in most situations it has been just fabulous. The bigger screen was also surprisingly nice for me. I was (and still am) comfortable on the iPod Touch, but the bigger screen gives you some flexibility to incorporate little extras such as illustrations. I had not realized how nice it would be to have these! My iPod Touch can handle cover art, but it doesn’t seem to manage embedded illustrations, and the eBookwise was a text-only dumb terminal. Many of the lovingly formatted MobileRead books are illustrated, and they are absolutely delightful.

It was also nice to experience poetry again. That can be a more more visual medium where the effect can be lost of you can’t see the proper line breaks. I downloaded Shakespeare’s Sonnets from MobileRead, and they looked absolutely perfect. After years of reading on tiny screens, I thought poetry was lost to me as an e-book option, so I am thrilled to have it back again.

The included cover on the Sony Reader was not the most comfortable thing in the world. It had edges that became sharp and uncomfortable after awhile, and I had to adjust the Reader so it was more flat in my hands. I do appreciate that it makes the Reader look like a real book, though. At school, I often don’t pull out my iPod when around students or colleagues because they associate it with music or games, even if that may not be what I’m doing with it at that moment. It will be nice to have something I can read in front of other people!

The books, for the most part, load fairly quickly—but big files may take longer. I downloaded a lavishly illustrated 2000 page Sherlock Holmes omnibus from MobileRead that took almost a full minute to launch once I opened it. But most of the regular books load reasonably briskly, and I have enjoyed using collections to browse them quickly. No more ‘dumb terminal’ one giant list of files to wade through!

A brief overview of the content options

If you don’t plan to read Sony content, there are plenty of options. So far, I have tried the following:

  • Files from the MobileRead community: This would be my preference as far as "free" reads go. Most of them have been hand-formatted specifically for the Sony, and many include illustrations. These are labors of love, and it shows. There are also some really nice omnibus collections which save one the effort of downloading multiple books in a series in the correct order. I have downloaded the complete Sherlock Holmes, and the first half of Baum’s Wizard of Oz series.
  • Files from Fictionwise: Fictionwise sells many of its titles in "multiformat," which means that once a book has been purchased, it can be downloaded in any of several different file options. I so appreciate that many titles have this option available because there is no restriction on how many times or in how many formats one may download a book. Once you own the book, you own it to enjoy on whatever devices you might have. So I can download the eReader version for my iPod Touch, and then download the LRF version for the Sony. Now that I have the Sony, I feel like I will look for this option more. I have (and probably will) still buy secure eReader if it’s a book I really want, because those can be read easily on my iPod Touch. But I would prefer it have the option to read on the Sony too, and why not since it’s my book? So I think buying the Sony has made my more cautious about buying DRM-locked eReader-only books which I can enjoy less flexibly.
  • Files from Feedbooks, Manybooks and Munseys: These free websites offer many Creative Commons and Public Domain books of all kinds. There are hundreds of thousands of titles available, and it’s not all Shakespeare and the Bible these days either! As a mystery fan, there was a ton available for me, from Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers to pulp fiction from the golden age. The files from Feedbooks looked beautiful; those from Manybooks looked slightly less polished and seemed to default to a smaller font. Haven’t tried Munseys yet. Consensus at the Mobile Read forums seems to be that the Feedbooks converter uses cleaner HTML and that if a version is available at both Feedbooks and Manybooks, it’s preferable to go with the Feedbooks version. But if Feedbooks doesn’t have it and Manybooks does, the Manybooks version is perfectly acceptable.
  • Files from Baen, Books for a Buck and other independent publishers: I have not tried these myself (all the Books for a Buck titles I own were purchased from Fictionwise and I access them there) but people tell me that Baen’s titles display quite nicely on the Sony, and there is a library of freebies available there which is definitely worth investigating. I am on March break this week and plan to go exploring!
  • Personal files on your computer: I had a little trouble converting some of my Word docs (I use Neo Office on a Mac) until the creator of Calibre gave me a tip: if I save the file as RTF, which the Sony can read natively, I won’t have choices when I try to transfer it over. If I want greater control (I was having font size issues) I should save it as HTML—then I can use Calibre’s built-in converter to get it into a format the Sony can read, and I can specify font size, among other things.

Some small annoyances

My Sony experience has been smooth so far, but of course, nothing is perfect. There are a few small annoyances for me. I hate that you can’t edit the book’s information/tags/collections on the go. This morning, I uploaded a bunch of magazines and when I went to read them on the subway, I found a typo in one of the titles. No way to fix it—I had to delete it and wait until I get home to edit it in Calibre and re-install.

I also dislike the way the font size works. There is a button you can press to toggle between the default font for each book, and two bigger ones. But there is no way to backtrack. If you select the second one and then decide it’s too big, you have to toggle through the other options (and wait for the pages to refresh!) until you get back to the beginning. On a large file, this can take some time.

Finally, I have found that on the larger screen, any inconsistencies or glitches in formatting are much more noticeable, and that can be a distraction. I find I really need to have a professional, nice-looking file. The glitchier ones with the off line breaks or slightly rougher source code need to be reserved for the smaller screen, I think, where the ‘prettiness’ isn’t as noticeable.

Overall conclusions

I see the iPod Touch being, for me, my quick-and-dirty on the go reader. Most of the titles I have which cannot be read on the Sony Reader are the secure eReader ones from Fictionwise—and most of those are fairly disposable best-sellers that I can motor through in a day or so during my commute. My more leisurely reads—classics, and experimental ones from indie authors—are either available at MobileRead or elsewhere for free, or are multiformat offerings from Fictionwise, which can load just fine on the Sony.

I still think my ideal device would be a Sony Reader sized iPod Touch. That would do the job for me in all but a few rare circumstances. But for now, I am happy to be a two-device girl and reserve the Sony for my more leisurely, reverent reading at home or when I have the time to really curl up for awhile. On days I travel lightly, I’m happy to keep reading on my iPod Touch too.

Images: The first is CC-licensed from bfishadow. The second is from Ficbot.

 
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