Two Weeks with a Sony PRS-700: Reading PDFs

By Chris Meadows

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 for reading on a landscape-oriented computer screen. However, by dint of wide use, PDF has become a sort of de facto “e-book” standard—especially in the role-playing game market, where publishers use it to offload printing costs of marginal titles onto the consumer.

The PRS-700, unlike most computer monitors, has a portrait orientation, so it should theoretically be better-suited to reading PDFs. The question is whether or not it really is.

The answer, it turns out, is a qualified “sort of”. (As always, click on the pictures for a closer view.)

Three Ways to View

There are three ways that PDFs can be viewed on the PRS-700.

The first is to load the PDF and view it page for page: a portrait-oriented book page on a portrait-oriented e-book display. For most PDFs, this does not do much more than give one a general idea of how the page looks; a page meant to be printed at 11 inches tall is not often very readable on a device about 6 inches tall. Perhaps this will change with the Kindle DX, Crunchpad, and other large-form-factor tablet displays.

The second method is to tap the “Settings” button, choose “Orientation,” and turn the PRS-700 90 degrees to the right. You are now viewing the upper portion of the PDF page in landscape, as you might view it on a computer screen. This works better, especially for PDFs that are scans of images of text rather than formatted text themselves.

One interesting thing I noticed while using this method is that the bottom half inch or so of the page was grayed out—drawn with every other line of e-ink pixels instead of solid. But when I paged down, I realized that this was because that was the portion of text that overlapped between two parts of the page. It was a little confusing at first, but it made sense once I understood what was going on.

The third method is to use the font size panel to increase the size of the font. The 700 will then attempt to make the text larger and reflow it so that it can more easily be read. Sometimes this works fairly well; other times—especially in role-playing game book PDFs with lots of graphical background elements—it does not.

I looked at three kinds of PDFs for this evaluation: image PDFs, PDFs of ordinary books, and PDFs of large role-playing game books. The results tended to be very different for each.

Image PDFs

Some PDFs are nothing more than images of printed pages—most commonly scans that have not been processed with optical character recognition, but are instead the equivalent of photocopies or microfiche: you can print them, or read them off the screen, but cannot copy and paste (or reflow) text.

Frequently, full-text magazine archive PDFs, of the sort found in on-line magazine indexes, are this type of PDF—since searchers were likely to be printing them out anyway, there was no need to do more than take a picture of the page.

Since images of text cannot be reflowed, the best way to read them is to use the landscape orientation to make the text view as large as possible. And even this is not necessarily ideal.

The image-PDF pages I looked at for this purpose were three stories taken from the EBSCOhost magazine index at my local public library’s website. One of the great things about EBSCOhost is that it keeps full-text and PDF image copies of the stories from full-text indexed magazines. One of these magazines is Fantasy & Science Fiction, which means a significant number of great stories are yours for the reading if your library has EBSCO.

The stories in question were “The Measure of All Things,” “Bronte’s Egg,” and “In Tibor’s Cardboard Castle,” by Richard Chwedyk. (Actually, only the first two of these were image PDFs; by the third, F&SF had started providing OCR’d PDFs.) I highly recommend these stories, by the way. They’re some of my favorites.

The results were mixed. The first of the stories was fairly easy to read, but the second suffered from a bit of bleedthrough in the scanning—text from the back half of the page being scanned made the background look a bit grey instead of white even viewing it on a computer screen. On the fairly low-contrast PRS-700 screen, it looked even worse.

Here is a comparison between the PRS-700 and my iPod Touch (in Air Sharing) showing the same bit of text. Even though the photo doesn’t have the relative light levels right (as seen from the screenshot above), the high-contrast screen of the iPod Touch was still much easier to read. I never in my wildest dreams imagined I would find myself saying an iPod Touch could view PDFs better than something with a bigger screen, but there you go.

Of course, if I had been able to zoom the PRS-700 in so that the margins were at the outer edges of the screen the way I did on the iPod, instead of having all that wasted space, results might have been different. But the zoom function on the 700 is somewhat more primitive, and meant only for zooming in on one thing you’d like to see closer rather than reading the entire thing at greater magnification.

Book PDFs

I looked at a couple of PDFs of ordinary text stories on here: the third Chwedyk story, Wil Wheaton’s Sunken Treasures sampler, some others. For the most part, they showed up fairly well, but they highlighted a couple of the issues I’ve already mentioned, about viewing PDF books on screens smaller than their print size.

For instance, look at this page from Wil Wheaton’s book. The picture is out of focus (it’s hard to take good photos of the 700 sometimes) but the individual words aren’t important. Look at the way it’s laid out on the page, with those huge margins to either side. It would look fine printed out, or on a computer monitor, or even on an iPhone or iPod Touch where you could zoom in to text width. But here, it just wastes screen real-estate and text size.

But no problem, right? You just make the text bigger, reflow it, and read it that way. But there is one annoying little problem with reflowing text: the reflowing stops at the end of each page. A page ends up being about two and a half screens’ worth of reflowed text, so you always get that half-screen of text at the end.

Of course, this would not keep you from being able to read the text on the page, but it would annoy you every few pages when you came up short.

I gather there are “reflowable” PDFs, that have been specially formatted so they do not have this problem. If there are, I don’t have any idea how I would go about finding one, and I suspect most of the PDFs I will encounter in my lifetime will be of the other variety anyway.

Role-Playing Game PDFs

RPG PDFs are an interesting case. They are one of the most commonly-sold forms of PDF e-book to this day. Notwithstanding some publishers’ attempts to control it, a burgeoning market has sprung up for PDF editions of in-print or out-of-print RPGs of all kinds (not to mention the immense number of illicit RPG book scans circulating on peer-to-peer, some of which are better-put-together than the professional editions of the same books).

Most professional game PDFs are, to put it bluntly, pigs. They are immense, bloated, multi-megabyte monstrosities that are suitable only for printing, or for viewing on a full-sized desktop computer. When you try to view them on something smaller, the results are not pretty.

Just how bloated are we talking? Exalted 2nd Edition: 60 megabytes. Dungeons and Dragons Rules Cyclopedia (commercial version): 80 megabytes. (If you want further proof of bloating, the illicit version somehow manages to pack all the same information and an index besides into only 18 megabytes.) Spycraft 2.0: 150 megabytes.

While these books might be a little thicker than your average role-playing game book (all right, to be honest, Spycraft 2.0 could probably stop bullets), the majority of the bloat comes from graphical page elements. Pretty background, margin, and sidebar images that look nice on the printed page or the monitor screen but cause some problems for smaller devices.

The PRS-700 did, as you can see, load Spycraft 2.0. (I was frankly rather surprised. When I tried to load it with Air Sharing on my iPod Touch, it spent several minutes straining, then crashed so hard it rebooted.)

However, after it loaded, the 700 slowed down immensely. Commands to page up or down took several seconds at best, or a minute or more at worst. And commands would queue up, so if I paged up, waited several seconds and it did nothing, then tried to page up again, after a while I found it would flip over several pages at once. And screen zooming/reflowing took forever. Smaller books, such as Exalted, were some better but not much.

When I did reflow the text, the page-splitting problem became even worse. I would be on one page and get text. Then I would flip down a page and (after about thirty seconds) get…one of the background images. Or a header. On Exalted, I would often find several whole pages of different background images between paragraphs of text—making the book fairly unreadable.

I will grant that PDFs from smaller, independent RPG publishers tended to fare better. Capes and Spirit of the Century, both being trade-paperback-sized gamebooks rather than the standard 8.5” x 11” size, have smaller-format PDFs that are more readable on the 700’s screen—especially in the landscape orientation. (They are also much smaller; Spirit of the Century is only 10 megabytes and Capes is less than 8.) While they do still have graphical elements that can cause problems in text reflow, there aren’t as many of them, and they look good enough by and large that reflowing them isn’t necessary.

And some publishers have sense enough to eschew that kind of graphical bloat almost entirely. James Wallis of Magnum Opus Press was kind enough to comp me a copy of the new edition of the British RPG Dragon Warriors so I could see how it looked on the PRS-700. It has a spare graphic design that doesn’t get in the way of reading and keeps the overall file size under 20 megabytes. (The illustrations in the “Three Ways to View” section are taken from Dragon Warriors.) There are still a few little bobbles (such as the title of the introduction section being placed at the head of the second column’s worth of text rather than the first), but it by and large works. I can even open it in my iPod Touch!

Even though this is only a side-effect of an overall book design philosophy of simplicity, just as the bloat is a side-effect of designing a flashy printed book with no thought for how big the PDF will be, I still have to say it’s very nicely done. I wish RPG publishers could come out with mobile viewing editions using ePub—or even PDF if they must—that leave out pretty-printed-page bloat in favor of being small enough to view in mobile readers.

Conclusion

The PRS-700 displays some PDFs better than others. For ordinary book PDFs, and some image PDFs, it does fairly well. Still, its lower-contrast screen means that in situations where contrast is important, the iPod Touch or iPhone can still outshine it (literally and figuratively). Reflowing text is nice when it works, but sometimes it simply does not.

The 700 is able to open some PDF files that are too large for the Touch to touch, but is still susceptible to significant slowdown in manipulating them—and the more graphically bloated a file is, the more irregularities reflowing it can bring to light.

That being said, by and large the 700 is a better way to read PDF files than on a computer screen—at least, for the files that aren’t bloated or low-contrast. I’d be hesitant to say it’s worth buying for that alone, however.