Here is a video demonstration of how the Sony PRS-700 does at reading e-books and showing photos. You won’t be able to see it in the full quality that it has in person, of course, but at least the footage should give you some idea of how it behaves. Technorati Tags: Sony,PRS-700,Sony PRS-700,YouTube,video,e-book,photos...

One of the big tests for the Sony PRS-700, and the thing I’ve been studying the most, is how well it displays the different formats of books it reads. Over the last few days, I have done more reading than I had done in the previous month, and am ready to make some observations. In this post, I will cover ePub and LRF-formatted books. In the next one, I will look at PDFs. Note that the comparison photos above and below may not show any of the platforms at its best, due to strange tricks that backlighting and flash photography play on...

I am in St. Louis this weekend, along with my parents, for a visit to my brother, sister-in-law, and four nieces and nephews. I am away from my own desktop computer, and am having to make do with a slightly flaky Ubuntu laptop---and do not quite have either the energy or the facilities to write the in-depth examination of how the PRS-700 deals with different e-book formats that I had intended. However, I have brought along the PRS-700 (as well as my iPod Touch) and have observed a few possibly-unexpected uses of the Sony Reader---and another flaw or two---along the way. (Update:...

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...

FedEx has informed me that my Sony PRS-700 Reader will arrive tomorrow before 10:30 a.m. I get to keep it for two weeks, officially starting Thursday but I’m not complaining about having an extra day to get the jump on things. I thought that, in the interest of chronicling my experiences, I would sit down and write down the preconceptions I come to this trial period with, so that I can look back in two weeks and see how much they have been changed by spending time with the thing. So, here are my uninformed impressions. Sony has offered me a generous...

Ars Technica today has a great (and long—it goes on for seven pages) feature editorial about the past and future of e-books by Ars columnist John Siracusa. Siracusa, who took a job at the company that would eventually become eReader back when it was still called Palm Digital Media, has some fascinating insights and opinions about how e-books got started, what they are now, and what they might become. Siracusa holds several opinions about e-books that may seem controversial. For example, he feels that people still don't "get" e-books even now—which is why e-books have been so slow to catch...