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| Sony Reader Touch Edition (PRS-600) Review |
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Sony Reader Touch Edition (PRS-600) Review http://www.sony.co.uk/product/rd-reader-ebook/prs-600 Reviewed by Misha Gale for UCL Tech Society ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ) Stone tablets. Papyrus. Parchment. Paper. E-Ink. If the last item in that list is new to you, it's a type of “Electronic Paper” developed at MIT and used in a growing number of commercially available eReaders. The technology is the opposite of conventional backlit displays (like the one in your phone or your laptop) which project artificial light into your retina. Electronic paper by contrast actually reflects ambient light in the same way printed books do, which means you don't suffer the eye-strain and headaches normally associated with prolonged reading from a screen. I've had the Sony PRS-600, AKA the Reader Touch Edition, for over six months now, used it for studying and recreation and frankly I think it's awesome. Not without it's flaws, but still inspiring of awe - Lets see why. The first thing you'll notice getting it out of the box is what's missing: no charger! Like a lot of portable electronics these days, the Reader doesn't come with a mains charger, although it can be (slowly) charged from the USB port of a computer. That said, Sony use the same charger for most of their devices, so if you have a PSP or Walkman you can probably use the charger for that. Otherwise, you probably need to buy one separately. You won't need to charge it very often though: one of the neat things about e-ink is that it only draws power when the display changes, i.e. when you turn a page, so the battery lasts a long time. Sony claim 7000 page turns on a single charge, and while that's a little overoptimistic you can easily expect to read a whole book without a trip to the mains. And how is the reading? Overall, I found it to be a very comfortable experience, in many cases even more so than reading a normal paperback. The device is small and light enough to be used one handed including turning the pages, either by using the buttons or by swiping a thumb across the screen. This is invaluable on crowded tube journeys, when you need a free hand to stop yourself falling into a strangers armpit or hold your moccafrappawotsitchino. It'll also fit into the back pocket of my jeans, so I no longer find myself selecting reading matter based on it's physical dimensions. The screen is crisp and clear, and you can easily adjust the size of the text if you find yourself reading in low-light or without your spectacles. It does suffer from slight screen glare, but it's only noticeable under the brightest artificial light (a 100W bulb without a shade for instance). It also offers a few features absent from an ordinary dead-tree edition, like the built-in Oxford English Dictionary. Pull out the stylus and double-tap a word to get an instant definition. Or use the stylus to highlight, doodle on or annotate the text (OK, you can do that with a regular book, but you don't get an index of your annotations and you can't erase them so easily). Or search through the book for a particular word (which I find useful e.g. in a novel when a character is referred to whose introduction I'd forgotten.) The Reader automatically remembers where you left off reading last time, but you can also virtually dog ear the pages to mark your place if you want to skip back or ahead. And of course, with 512MB of built-in storage plus two memory card ports (SD and MS-Duo) you can store hundreds of volumes at once. Aside from reading for pleasure, it is also very useful as a study aid. During the exam term, it was a real help to be able to carry all my lecture notes and textbooks in my pocket with me all the time. Of course, my department makes all the notes and course materials available electronically. If your lecturers give paper handouts or expect you take your own notes it's not so useful. Also, the Reader isn't always ideal for reading PDFs, which tend to be formatted for A4, which often leaves text almost unreadably small when shrunk to fit the little display. It does support something called “reflow”: extracting the text from a document independent of it's formatting so it can be rendered appropriately on the small screen. How well this works depends on the document. If it contains a lot of footnotes, diagrams or formatting these might get left out or appear out of order. So much as I adore my Reader, it's not perfect. For many people, however much more practical it may be, it'll just never have the same sensual pleasure of a paper book: the smell, the feel or sound of ordinary pages. But aside from such ephemeral concerns, there are more substantial problems, like the bundled software. It's not terrible, but it's far from great either. Fortunately, there is an alternative, a free, multi-platform application called Calibre. There's also the Reader's audio feature, which I've not mentioned till now because it's a bit rubbish. It's pretty good for a few audiobooks, but when I slotted in an SD card with a large music library, the Reader locked up for a good ten minutes trying to catalogue the tracks, and would have continued longer had I not given up and yanked the card. There was also an occasion when it locked up completely, failing to respond to any input at all including the power switch or poking a pin into the factory reset orifice. Happily, it turned out to be fixable by plugging in a mains charger (the kind it doesn't come with!) The Reader is now an old model, which means if you shop around a bit you can find it online for as little as £125 (overstock.com), but it generally retails around £199 (play.com). Ebooks themselves tend to be priced a bit higher than a paperback, but then put on sale for a bit less. Publishers are still having a hard time deciding on how to price ebooks it seems, so expect prices to vary quite a bit. The biggest problem though, is institutional. There are currently only two mainstream ebook shops in the UK, WH Smiths and Waterstones. The selection isn't bad, but it's a tiny subset of the published canon. There are plenty of books I've wanted to buy which have simply never been released in digital format (or at least, not legally.) Finding the textbooks on your reading list will be tricky, and you will probably have to settle for different titles. That said, there is a truly impressive selection of public domain texts available free from the website of Project Gutenberg – pretty much every major work which is no longer covered by copyright. Download a hundred or so of these and the Reader can be said to have paid for itself. You can easily carry around in your pocket the complete works of Shakespeare, Dickens, Chaucer, Austen and still have room for War and Peace. But you might not look quite so interestingly intellectual reading them.
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