How do you load magazines or smaller PDFs on this thing? They come out too small to read and it would greatly enhance its utility for me if I could read PDFs at larger size - a lot of my journal articles, etc., are PDF… Thanks!!

I guess the question is do people want a hand held just for reading books?

I’ve used many ebook readers — have read many books on my palm and clie (also REB 1200), and I’m looking for the ideal reader. I went to Sony Style the other day and spent a long time with the Sony Reader, but I was completely disappointed. The “paper” looks like very bad quality newsprint — it’s greyish, and the black print doesn’t contrast very well. A good ereader needs to be flexible — you have to be able to read word files, text files, pdf’s, html files, and several DRM’ed files. The Sony doesn’t do this — apparently pdf’s are pretty much unreadable on the Sony. I’ve just started using a Nokia 770 with fbreader, which I like a lot (backlighting is important for me), but of course you can’t read any DRM’ed stuff on it (yet?). But it DOES show how good a small backlit device with very high resolution can be for ebooks. My own opinion — epaper is not the best way to go. A very high quality backlit screen is much easier to read. Advantages of the Nokia? 1. Better size; 2. vivid color, very high resolution; 3. more formats (except DRM) — very easy to load material; 4. backlit — can read it in a dark room or in bed; 5. also a browser, photo viewer, movie viewer, etc. But even just as an ereader, the Nokia 770 blows the Sony away. They’re both about the same price. And Nokia is coming out with an updated model that will include a camera.

I also am an e-book fan, having bought every widely-distributed device since the SoftBook. The new technology looks like a winner. But it looks as though Sony has learned absolutely nothing from the experience of its predecessors. Sony is trying to monopolize content for the platform, and that’s the kiss of death.

As much as I’d like to see e-books prosper and become widely available, I’m rooting against Sony. If you read the fine print on their web site, you realize that Sony doesn’t have the least respect for the free interchange of ideas.

For example, you’ll see that Sony reserves the right to edit or delete reviews submitted by users according to its “review guidelines”, but that you can’t even see these guidelines until you’ve submitted a review. Extrapolating from Sony’s privacy statement (which itself might be summarized as “Privacy: none, except as absolutely required by law, and maybe not then”), it appears that this policy allows Sony to edit or delete reviews for any reason, and that all reviews become the absolute property of Sony. As far as I can tell, this would allow them to change the tone of a review completely, and if you dared to challenge them by posting a statement somewhere to the effect of “that’s not what I wrote–this is what I really wrote:”, you’d be violating Sony’s rights because you’d have absolutely no right to quote your own text.

The Sony Reader is not only NOT being sold in Europe, when you register at the content site you have to verify that you are a resident of the U.S. This strikes me as overkill if all they’re trying to do is rationalize their distribution. Perhaps they do it because they can’t do business this way in any country that has real privacy laws.

Does this make you feel good about the possibility of Sony guiding the future of reading? I find it a terrifying possibility.

Fortunately, the lack of content for the new platform (and the appallingly bad access it provides to the content it does have) make the possibility of success very remote. But this will be one more failure, and so it will be even longer before we have a real, sensible e-book platform to use.