Comments on: Sony Reader felled by the classics
It takes a long time to get into a good book, particularly if it's electronic.
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I can't recall how I actually registered the device, but it took about five minutes and somehow I got it accomplished."
There we go with that pesky "journalism" again.
I can't recall how I actually registered the device, but it took about five minutes and somehow I got it accomplished."
There we go with that pesky "journalism" again.
Go read up on Sony's actions:
http://substantialsimilarity.org/wp-content/uploads/subsim/2007/12/disaster-final.pdf
Second, why should I buy an unreliable and faulty Sony "reader" and pay $20 for books, when I can download the same books onto my PDA from Project Gutenberg for free, and then use my PDA for a myriad of other things besides reading?
The decision was a no-brainer...I mean Sony's decision was a no-brainer, mine was the smart choice.
I've read ebooks on the small screen of a PDA for years and the experience of reading on the Sony Reader is much more pleasurable.
Go read up on Sony's actions:
http://substantialsimilarity.org/wp-content/uploads/subsim/2007/12/disaster-final.pdf
Second, why should I buy an unreliable and faulty Sony "reader" and pay $20 for books, when I can download the same books onto my PDA from Project Gutenberg for free, and then use my PDA for a myriad of other things besides reading?
The decision was a no-brainer...I mean Sony's decision was a no-brainer, mine was the smart choice.
I've read ebooks on the small screen of a PDA for years and the experience of reading on the Sony Reader is much more pleasurable.
They're gorgeous, and the e-ink display is wonderful, but when it comes to actually using them they just ... suck. The e-ink display isn't fast enough for their UI, and rendering is horribly slow. Books are unbelievably expensive and there aren't very many of them. It supports exactly zero popular e-book formats.
I wanted to like Sony's book, I really did, but it is just not a good unit.
I've been watching the other players come (and usually go) and none of them had the right mix of price, capability, and document availability. Until a few weeks ago, that is, when Amazon released the Kindle.
Reviewers have panned the Kindle for all kinds of reasons -- the ergonomics seem almost senseless, the user interface is decidedly weird, and it's really expensive. But let me tell you first hand: It doesn't suck. At all. They lose against Sony in the looks and ergonomics department, but smash the ball out of the park when it comes to actually using the thing.
First and foremost Amazon has gone a long way towards fixing the book availability problem. They have almost five times as many titles as Sony, and their titles are much less expensive -- less expensive than paper. I want to see them expand their catalog a lot, but they do have a lot of current titles by major publishers that have been sorely lacking with other readers.
The Kindle's odd LCD-on-the-side UI is unusual but completely solves the interactivity problem e-ink displays have given their long repaint cycle. I hate click wheels with a passion but the interface is simple and it works.
Using a cellular network for data transfer is a stroke of genius. WiFi is faster, and it would surely make web browsing less painful (it's a lousy web browser, barely better than my phone), but WiFi is nowhere near as broadly available as Sprint's cell network. For downloading documents it works rather well, and having Amazon's store at your fingertips almost everywhere is really a nice feature. (And the lock-in is good for them, of course.)
What surprised me, though, was that the Kindle supports a couple of different e-book formats in which I already had titles. None of the DRMed titles are supported out-of-the-box, of course (although there are hacks for Mobipocket titles), but even without them about a third of the e-books I purchased for my PDA opened just fine. It doesn't do PDF, for which it is repeatedly knocked, but PDF is not a popular book format (at all, and for good reason). Still, the PDF-to-Mobipocket converter works ok on many documents so even here the Kindle is not really shut out.
I know I'm sounding like a salesman, and I'm sorry about that. In truth I recommend that most people wait for at least the next revision -- which should be much cheaper and fix a lot of the bugaboos in the current product. If you want a good electronic reader and you're relatively price-insensitive, though, the Kindle is a pretty nice little unit. Even if it is kind of ugly.
If there's a formatted book you need converted to the Sony format then use libprs500.exe that you can download free from the website. I've been using libprs500 to convert books I've downloaded from sites and it works perfectly. I also use libprs500 to download Newsweek, BBC newspaper, The Wall Street Journal, and a few other newspapers for free. Oh, did I mention that it's FREE? How much did you need to pay for those subscriptions on your Kindle? On the Sony eBook site you can download feeds from Engadget and other websites...for free. Did I mention previously that I'm able to load FREE books and convert them for FREE and put them onto my PRS-505 without any hassles? With the Kindle you'll need to pay to have Amazon convert and email the book back to you.
So if the Kindle has all those books, how many of those 90,000 books are you actually going to buy and read? Granted the Sony site has 28,000 books available, but with Borders just about to join up I'm sure that'll change. Plus as I mentioned previously I can go to a website, download a book from, say, Gutenberg.org and throw it right into my Reader. Wireless is nice for the Kindle, but your battery life will suffer. 3 days of use with your Kindle is a far cry from over a week or two of use with the Sony Reader.
So overall, I think your assessment of the Sony is shortsighted and really sounds like you love your Kindle and are trying to justify spending $100 over the Sony Reader's $300 price.
I believe that Sony dropped the prices of their books along with other ebook stores like Fictionwise to compete with Amazon.
As far as formats, the Sony Reader supports TXT / RTF / PDF (unencrypted), along with Sony's proprietary format. These are popular formats as far as Project Gutenberg and other sites are concerned. Amazon chose not to support the popular Mobipocket format that other sites sell and which Amazon sold as well. Instead they created their own proprietary version and alienated all those people who had purchased Mobipocket books from Amazon.
I'm not saying the Sony Reader is perfect, but just trying to clear up some misinformation.
They're gorgeous, and the e-ink display is wonderful, but when it comes to actually using them they just ... suck. The e-ink display isn't fast enough for their UI, and rendering is horribly slow. Books are unbelievably expensive and there aren't very many of them. It supports exactly zero popular e-book formats.
I wanted to like Sony's book, I really did, but it is just not a good unit.
I've been watching the other players come (and usually go) and none of them had the right mix of price, capability, and document availability. Until a few weeks ago, that is, when Amazon released the Kindle.
Reviewers have panned the Kindle for all kinds of reasons -- the ergonomics seem almost senseless, the user interface is decidedly weird, and it's really expensive. But let me tell you first hand: It doesn't suck. At all. They lose against Sony in the looks and ergonomics department, but smash the ball out of the park when it comes to actually using the thing.
First and foremost Amazon has gone a long way towards fixing the book availability problem. They have almost five times as many titles as Sony, and their titles are much less expensive -- less expensive than paper. I want to see them expand their catalog a lot, but they do have a lot of current titles by major publishers that have been sorely lacking with other readers.
The Kindle's odd LCD-on-the-side UI is unusual but completely solves the interactivity problem e-ink displays have given their long repaint cycle. I hate click wheels with a passion but the interface is simple and it works.
Using a cellular network for data transfer is a stroke of genius. WiFi is faster, and it would surely make web browsing less painful (it's a lousy web browser, barely better than my phone), but WiFi is nowhere near as broadly available as Sprint's cell network. For downloading documents it works rather well, and having Amazon's store at your fingertips almost everywhere is really a nice feature. (And the lock-in is good for them, of course.)
What surprised me, though, was that the Kindle supports a couple of different e-book formats in which I already had titles. None of the DRMed titles are supported out-of-the-box, of course (although there are hacks for Mobipocket titles), but even without them about a third of the e-books I purchased for my PDA opened just fine. It doesn't do PDF, for which it is repeatedly knocked, but PDF is not a popular book format (at all, and for good reason). Still, the PDF-to-Mobipocket converter works ok on many documents so even here the Kindle is not really shut out.
I know I'm sounding like a salesman, and I'm sorry about that. In truth I recommend that most people wait for at least the next revision -- which should be much cheaper and fix a lot of the bugaboos in the current product. If you want a good electronic reader and you're relatively price-insensitive, though, the Kindle is a pretty nice little unit. Even if it is kind of ugly.
If there's a formatted book you need converted to the Sony format then use libprs500.exe that you can download free from the website. I've been using libprs500 to convert books I've downloaded from sites and it works perfectly. I also use libprs500 to download Newsweek, BBC newspaper, The Wall Street Journal, and a few other newspapers for free. Oh, did I mention that it's FREE? How much did you need to pay for those subscriptions on your Kindle? On the Sony eBook site you can download feeds from Engadget and other websites...for free. Did I mention previously that I'm able to load FREE books and convert them for FREE and put them onto my PRS-505 without any hassles? With the Kindle you'll need to pay to have Amazon convert and email the book back to you.
So if the Kindle has all those books, how many of those 90,000 books are you actually going to buy and read? Granted the Sony site has 28,000 books available, but with Borders just about to join up I'm sure that'll change. Plus as I mentioned previously I can go to a website, download a book from, say, Gutenberg.org and throw it right into my Reader. Wireless is nice for the Kindle, but your battery life will suffer. 3 days of use with your Kindle is a far cry from over a week or two of use with the Sony Reader.
So overall, I think your assessment of the Sony is shortsighted and really sounds like you love your Kindle and are trying to justify spending $100 over the Sony Reader's $300 price.
I believe that Sony dropped the prices of their books along with other ebook stores like Fictionwise to compete with Amazon.
As far as formats, the Sony Reader supports TXT / RTF / PDF (unencrypted), along with Sony's proprietary format. These are popular formats as far as Project Gutenberg and other sites are concerned. Amazon chose not to support the popular Mobipocket format that other sites sell and which Amazon sold as well. Instead they created their own proprietary version and alienated all those people who had purchased Mobipocket books from Amazon.
I'm not saying the Sony Reader is perfect, but just trying to clear up some misinformation.
Give me a freaking break! Take a walk around the houseand lok out the windows, pet the dog or the cat, Feed the fish, stop and smell the roses! then go back and read your book becasue by then it will be loaded!
Give me a freaking break! Take a walk around the houseand lok out the windows, pet the dog or the cat, Feed the fish, stop and smell the roses! then go back and read your book becasue by then it will be loaded!
- no loading but calculating page breaks
- by ianm74 December 19, 2007 7:11 AM PST
- Loading large books is slow because the reader is calculating where the page offsets should be. It needs to do this in order to give you the page count at the bottom of the screen. Perhaps this could be done on a separate thread in order to keep the UI more responsive. One way to work around this is to open the book in the PC reader software first. This causes the same pagination load to be done but on your PC with a much more powerful processor this is much quicker. Then when you copy the book to the reader ( using the reader software ) the page offset information is copied as well so it doesn't need to be calculated at first file open time. Hope this is useful.
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