“In the end, the Sony’s seemingly inexhaustible battery life made it the only useful device for reading on the long-duration flights. It easily fit my wife’s and my own reading choices on an SD card, with multiple titles for each of us…” – Wowio‘s Gerry Manacsa (via Mike Cane).
The TeleRead take: But wait! Gerry tells us he’d prefer “a single device for all my in-flight entertainment,” and he’s rooting for good e-book reading software to emerge for the iPhone when Apple finally releases a software development kit. It’ll be interesting to see how the ad-supported Wowio e-book service optimizes itself for the Sony Reader, the iPhone and other devices. Wowio is now PDFcentric. Here’s to Wowio doing the reflowable .epub format in the near future, so it can more easily accommodate a variety of devices!
Missing from Gerry’s item: Any mention of the Kindle, even in terms of, “What if I’d tried this?” In effect, as I see it, this is another reminder to publishers of the need for .epub and a multidevice approach—rather than expecting the Kindle to be the true iPod of e-books.
Question for Sony owners: How much does your battery life go down when you rely on a memory card (mention the size of your card)?
And for Kindle owners: How well do Wowio books display when the PDF is converted for the Kindle?
A couple of points:
1. The battery life on my Sony 500 is measured in “many days”, even with reading 2 or more hours a day. I use a 512MB SD card which will hold more books than you could ever read. It doesn’t seem to have any impact on battery life. The Sony will be my choice to take to CES, where I will have a very long plane flight (connection and layovers).
2. I’ve given up on WOWIO books on the Sony. The fonts are just too small for comfortable reading. It’s a shame, since they have some very good stuff, but as long as they stay with that PDF format they are very user unfriendly.
3. I don’t see my iPhone as a “long distance” reader, because I’d probably want to use it as an MP3 player as well. This, combined with keeping the screen on constantly for reading, would suck the battery down. The Sony, or other eink device, will always be preferable if battery life is important.
Nokia N800 or N810 still wins, IMHO. Excellent battery life, nice screen, expandable storage. FBreader available, PDF viewer is *much* improved in OS2008 and now is perfect for book reading. Plays music and video as well, if you’re looking for a single device. Plus it’s easy to hide from the flight attendants so you can read during takeoff & landing. 🙂
David asks:
“And for Kindle owners: How well do Wowio books display when the PDF is converted for the Kindle?”
I have a Kindle and have not tried to put a Wowio book on it. However, I will try that when I get home this evening and will report back to you.
I finally got around to grabbing a book from Wowio to convert/load onto my Kindle.
The book I used was the “Christmas Collection” since it was the only book available without having to go thru their registration process.
The design of the book was IMHO rather horrid – lots of different colored fonts on bright colored backgrounds. Very unpleasant to read.
Using Mobipocket Creator I imported the Wowio pdf and converted it into a prc file.
Viewing the file in the Mobipocket Reader I saw that it did not convert all the colored text to black. I suspected that might be a problem on the Kindle.
The formatting of the converted pdf left a bit to be desired also.
Opening the book on the Kindle I could see right away that the Kindle tried to display some of the colored text in one of its few shades of grey. Some of the text that was in a very light color did not display at all on the Kindle – you were left viewing a few blank “pages”.
I took a look at the html file that Mobipocket Creator pulled from the pdf and there was a lot of very different colors used in the font tag. If I was using my pc that has Dreamweaver on it I could have very easily stripped all the font colors from the document but I was not up to the task using notepad++ this morning so I didn’t bother.
One should just keep in mind that if they are converting such “vibrantly” designed pdf’s that if they just dump all the font colors the book will be fine.
One interesting thing I discovered during this process was that when I plugged the Kindle into my pc that the Mobipocket Reader recognized it as an ebook device. It allowed me to drag and drop the prc from the Reader library onto the Kindle. However in doing so it created a new folder called ebooks. All books on the Kindle need to be placed in the document folder so the Kindle did not have the new book appear in the Kindle library. I’m sure a simple change in the Reader and Kindle software could correct this easily.