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Down with paper: A review of the Sony Reader

Sony takes a second shot at reviving e-books with a redesigned "Portable …

The Reading Experience

The reading experience is so much like reading a paper novel that any report on it will read like a remedial lesson in using a book. (Note: if you have in fact forgotten how to use a book, it's time to step away from the keyboard.) Nevertheless, there are a few observations to make.


The view is good from any angle

Two: text does not look like it does in a book. I know, I know (see above), but the textual facsimile isn't perfect. The background for the screen is a light gray, like using bad recycled paper. And the text is not a pure black but a darker gray. The effect is not unpleasant and doesn't appear to lead to eyestrain, but it's something to be aware of if you're a purist.


Whenever the screen needs to refresh, it first flashes the display to black, then back to whatever image is next slated to appear. This is a limitation of the current E Ink technology, which relies on charged pigment balls sandwiched between electrodes. These balls have to be "reset" to form a new image, and even when they are, slight ghosting is sometimes visible from the last page displayed. If you buy a Reader, be prepared to explain this to everyone who sees the device. If saying "pigment balls" makes you giggle, you probably don't have the money to buy one anyway.


The annoyance is less mild when it comes to PDFs. If you're a business traveler or a tech junkie, you might have visions of using the Reader to catch up on reports and whitepapers. PDFs can take longer to cycle through, though (I've seen times as long as seven seconds), and text is generally not as clear as with e-books (there are only two zoom levels: ‘fit to width' and ‘fit to screen').

This can make text hard to read, and though Sony says the issue can be addressed by formatting PDFs to better fit the screen dimensions, this isn't practical for most PDFs. A better alternative is...

Five: rotating the screen. Holding down the little magnifying glass button for five seconds rotates the screen into horizontal position. This makes reading PDFs much easier at the cost of seeing fewer lines of text at once. It also means that the page turn buttons aren't quite as perfectly placed, but in many ways this is a superior reading experience.

Landscape view: it's delicious with coffee.

Six: bookmarking is in, annotating is out. Bookmarking couldn't be simpler; just press the little 'bookmark' button and the top right corner of the page turns down graphically. The device knows exactly where you are in the text, even if pages are later resized or the view is rotated. It's simple to do, and just as simple to jump to bookmarked passages.

It's not possible to annotate documents, though, and in fact the thought of doing so using the directional buttons and an onscreen keyboard makes me weep just a little inside. You won't be marking up the annual report during the flight, but then, it is called the Reader, so you probably knew that.

Seven: autosyncing is here. The first version of the Reader didn't support autosyncing of library content to the device. The new eBook Library desktop app can autosync music, photos, and documents whenever the Reader is plugged in. It's a welcome change.

Unfortunately, Mac and Linux users won't be doing any autosyncing. Despite the fact that the Reader is powered by Montavista Linux and uses code from projects like OpenSSL and Freetype, the desktop app needed to access to Connect store and sync the device is for Windows only.

If something's worth doing at all, it's worth doing well 

The Reader isn't just a reader. It's also a really half-assed music player and grayscale photo viewer. The upside is that it handles plenty of document formats and supports memory cards, making it easy to boost the 200MB of internal storage to something truly useful.

Unfortunately, someone dropped a great big can of Suck into the water supply over at Sony just as these features were added. The music feature, for instance, doesn't support albums. It doesn't support playlists. Every song you bring over to the Reader appears in a single long list. When you start the music playing, it plays through this list completely. And then it starts over. And over again. Like a Terminator, it stops for nothing, even continuing to play when the device is powered off and back on. (I learned this the hard way while draining my battery. The Reader had played through my brief playlist about thirty times, even with a couple of power-offs in there.)

I hope you were planning to play these tracks in order?

It is nice to have background music when reading, but be aware that this drains the battery quickly.

Pictures are also limited, though there is a slideshow option. Photos shot in plenty of light look sharp, but those without enough light call for squints just to make out the subject matter amid all that wash of gray. It's not clear what the level of consumer desire is for a gray scale photo viewer, but I'm going out on a limb and guessing that it is not high.

It's a Reader showing a picture of me holding a Reader. Oh, the recursion!

Let's be clear: I would rather have these features than not have them, but it would have been nice to make them a bit more fully-assed.

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