OK, so I've been looking to acquire an e-book reader for a while now. I've seen the Kindle, from Amazon - too pricey! I've seen the iRex Iliad - still too pricey!! So the only other real choice is Sony PRS-505.
At a little over $300 (with taxes and shipping) this is not a bad little device. The eink technology is beautiful! The letter seem to jump right off the screen, much the way a paperback book does. It's very easy on the eyes making for a comfortable read. The control are fairly intuitive, anyone one who's even mildly familiar with technology can figure it out pretty quickly without even reading the manual. The price isn't too bad either.
But the real meat of device like this is available content. I have a host of technical books on PDF that I was hoping to be able to use on the device. Afterall, lugging around the Windows 2003 Server bible in hard cover form, while being a very good work out, could get tiring after a while. But alas, my dream of having my technical library at my fingertips is still a couple of rung away...
In order to get a PDF file into the reader, you have to convert it to text or BBeB (Sony's proprietary format). While this may be OK for short stories and business management books (note to self, add some business management books to my e-library) it's cumbersome with technical books. This is due to the fact that technical books don't read like a story or philosophy book. It's technical details like "To change a user's access rights in AD use the CACLS tool in the following syntax...".
My hope is that someone, somewhere will come up with an easy way to convert PDF files to BBeB without losing the formatting or TOC.
All in all, however; I'd give it about 4.5 out of 5 stars. Now if I can just find a text copy of the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People...
‘Hades 2’: Our 8 Best Tips to Get You Started
33 minutes ago
2 comments:
Hey Gary, I haven't talked to you in awhile. I was catching up on some of your blogs. I was just discussing getting this Sony eBook with my wife for the same reason, I have tons of technical PDFs to read and don't want to spend any more time staring at my monitor than I already do. But it was my understanding (from several sources) that the eBook could read PDFs natively. The only problem was that it displayed them in their original format (generally 8.5 x 11) instead of whatever the eBook reader is (I only know the pixels are 800x600) without being able to zoom in or anything. The solution for the image quality issue (per Sony) was to reformat the PDFs to the appropriate size to fit the ebook. My hope was that a program existed that will reformat PDFs to a different size in bulk. If you get a chance to play around with the device again, I'd be really interested to hear confirmation on how it handles PDFs. The other option is to format PDFs into RTF which it can display (which is what it converts Word docs into).
You may be interested in this:
http://esupport.sony.com/perl/swu-download.pl?upd_id=3623&mdl=PRS505SC
Post a Comment