Two weeks with a Sony PRS-700: Getting started

By Chris Meadows

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 idea of giving the user a convenient “road map” to how to get started with the device. This thing was huge! Luckily I managed to get it all folded back up again after I had examined it.

The setup process was generally intuitive, at least to someone who has connected as much stuff to his computer as I have. I only ended up needing to consult it after installation to figure out how to move books to the Reader using the Library application. Since then, I haven’t consulted either the quick start guide or the manual (though I do have that on the device itself).

Installation

The software installation process was not hard. The Sony Library software installed quickly and easily, and the PDF-format manual installed to the start menu with a separate selection from the setup disc.

Connection to the PC is done with a standard mini-USB cable, like you might use to charge up your cell phone. The USB provides both power and data link, and the link-up is automatic as long as the device is plugged in. You should “eject” it using the eject icon next to the Reader’s listing in the side panel of the library before you unplug it.

Library

Now, I may not be utilizing the Library conduit program to its fullest potential yet, but it seems to me that it could be made a little more useful. It lets you import files and directories into your library and sync them over to the PRS-700, and even lets you preview what they will look like when they are there.

But there is a problem or two with library management. First of all, the name of the file that you import is not always the name it is catalogued in the library with. And Library does not tell you what name it is going to assign that file, which apparently comes from its metadata.

Now, with a nice, orderly ePub or LRF file, where author and title are clearly defined in the metadata, this is not a bad thing; they’ll show up listed by author and title just like in a real library.

But for PDFs, sometimes God only knows what you will get. For instance, I have a pair of PDFs in my library that it has decided to name “Acr1F6.tmp” and “Acr4D.tmp”, as well as a number of PDFs from Tor that ended up named by their ISBN.

And this leads to the second problem: Library won’t let me rename or enter new metadata for them. So if “Acr1F6.tmp” it is, “Acr1F6.tmp” it stays. This is a problem that Calibre does not have.

Calibre

If I were keeping this reader instead of just reviewing it, Calibre is the conduit I would go to full-time (and in fact even without the Sony Reader, I will still be using it for e-book conversion). It does most of the same things Library does (though previewing an e-book is more involved than Library’s just-click-on-it) and a lot more, including converting e-books from a variety of formats into ePub, MobiPocket, or Sony LRF formats. You can set the metadata to your heart’s content, add a cover image, make formatting decisions (such as, my favorite, turning off full-justification), and so on.

During my first day, I used Calibre to convert a number of e-books out of HTML format (such as books from Baen freebie CDs that were released before Baen started doing ePub or LRF). I had a few minor problems getting started, but a few posts to the Calibre community on MobileRead (frequented by Calibre developers as well as users) were sufficient to set me straight. After I converted them, installing them to the device was just as easy as right-clicking and selecting the option.

I would say that, like most open-source software, Calibre has a ways to go in terms of absolute user-friendliness. I think that some of the options and the ways in which they are presented could be confusing to users. But on the other hand, there seems to be kind of an inverse relationship between how friendly something is and how powerful it is, and for my own uses I’m glad Calibre tends toward the powerful side.