Review of Sony Reader PRS-500 Ebook reader

Well, I’ve finally done it. I’ve just read a full-length book digitally. And I liked it.

OK, so I’m not exactly the cutting edge early adopter you’d expect a tech reviewer to be. Ebooks have been around for years, after all. But they’ve always been so darned uncomfortable to read. What made the crucial difference? The Sony Reader and its paper-like E Ink display.

The nine-ounce, 6.9 by 4.9 inch Reader has the friendly dimensions of a trade paperback and comes with a cozy leather cover. A pleasure to hold, the Reader’s display is what makes the user experience feel perfectly natural. It’s not backlit like a CRT or LCD, so it’s friendly to the eyes. Instead, e Ink employs tiny, polarized white and black globules that are attracted to either the top or bottom of a sandwiched electrode matrix with each new page. Once a page has rendered, the particulate poseurs can remain in place indefinitely. No additional power is needed to sustain the display. And text can be comfortably viewed from just about any angle, even in full sun.

I downloaded Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs (Scribner, 2003) by Chuck Klosterman from Sony’s Connect Reader site. Luckily, it was a killer selection, and, before I knew it, I completely forgot I was doing a tech review at all. I just read the thing; in bed, at the dinner table—in short, I did everything I’d do with a paperback but take it into the bathtub.

But how does it compare with actual print? The Sony Reader’s display is, in fact, lower contrast than a printed page. While text appears crisp and black, the “page” itself is tinted grayish brown, thus making graphic novels, for instance, very difficult to read when compared to their actual paper counterparts.

What about other ebook and text file formats? For me, the Reader only reliably displayed Sony’s preferred ebook format, called BBeB. (Broadband eBook Format). Other formats were pretty hit-and-miss. While the device does support popular PDF files, for instance, the small screen size made for uncomfortable reading.

What about navigation? Despite the relative simplicity of its purpose, the Sony Reader’s menus were clumsy and the unit seems to have been designed for readers who turn pages from left to right. This right-handed westerner found even the most basic functions cumbersome, and you can’t quickly flip through pages as you could with a paperback. It’s a good thing the device lets readers place and recall dozens of bookmarks because finding a particular passage could otherwise take quite a while.

Flaws aside, the Sony Reader is the first product to convince me of the ebook’s potential for delivering a comfortable, extended reading experience. That alone makes it worth looking at. And if Sony ever develops a submersible reader I can take into the bathtub, I may never buy a novel in print again.