Comments on: Glimpse at new Sony Reader

By: mark

mark — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 00:43:16 +0000

I am going to get one but before I do. I just want to clear 1 thing. Can I load my own ebooks and other pdf file without converting it? or does have to be converted

By: Adam Saltman

Adam Saltman — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 20:30:07 +0000

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!!

By: Aaron Sanford

Aaron Sanford — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 02:26:39 +0000

OK, I’ve got one, $297.99! One of the best electronic buys I’ve ever made and I’ve been into computers since the early 70’s (can you say 8086 and AppleII?). I cannot read ten pages on an LCD screen, I can read for hours on this thing! Battery life isn’t as good as advertised but still plenty for a short trip. Those of you who keep comparing them to PDAs, no comparison, these just blow away PDAs - FOR READING EBOOKS. Yes, they are uni-taskers but you get what you pay for. I love reading and this is definitely the tool for me. Now, if they would just handle PDAs better…

By: Larry Smith

Larry Smith — Mon, 14 May 2007 18:29:24 +0000

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

By: paper shredders

paper shredders — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 06:28:35 +0000

It’s like the difference between a real painting and a video of a painting, the light characteristics are completely different.

By: George

George — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 03:02:56 +0000

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.

By: paper shredders

paper shredders — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 06:23:06 +0000

The thing that most people miss is the difference between this screen and any LCD.

By: Dan D

Dan D — Wed, 22 Nov 2006 18:47:34 +0000

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.

By: Larisa M.

Larisa M. — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 01:01:27 +0000

Incidentally, has anyone found a good way to get this thing to display text in non-Latin characters (Cyrillic, for example)? I’d buy this thing in a millisecond if I could read my Russian e-books on it.

By: Camilo Camacho

Camilo Camacho — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 19:12:54 +0000

I have been waiting this thing for so long, too many ebooks, but i cannot stand a computer display for too long.

When i can get my hands on one of these (e-ink), i will be very happy, lot of manga, newspaper (i think lemonde is available in pdf)