I own a Sony PRS-505 e-Reader. I’ve had it a few years now.
Originally I was really very pleased with it, and I have used it a lot, but
gradually it is becoming just another electronic white elephant. It lies about
the house, and on the rare occasions I wish to use it the battery is invariably
flat. I don’t mean to be unkind to it, but if I stop using something it usually
has some significance, if I can just work out what it is. Something like
“voting with my feet”.
Much of my disappointment with the Sony machine is a result
of the e-book market not moving in the direction that was predicted when I
bought it. I bought it because my main interest is in being able to read free
downloadable pdf format books – mostly 19th Century memoirs and
histories. I have a great many of these, mostly obtained from Google Books or
Project Gutenberg. Much of the specification of what I need my e-reader to do
is built around things I need and things which I do not like and am not
interested in.
* I do not wish to be glued into a single supplier (such as
Amazon) – they do not offer the books I am looking for.
* I require scanned pdf’s to be readable – one problem with
my current machine is that the pdf’s have to be especially clear to display at
all. Another is that the display size is not adjustable for pdf’s, and the
simple task of turning the page requires the entire book image to be
reformatted or reflowed, which takes about 20 seconds.
* I cannot use epub books for the material I study. It’s a
nice idea, but the automatic character-recognition software used to construct
these things at Google is mostly a joke. Being American, it has little patience
with strange, foreign concepts such as accented characters, or with 19th
Century fonts, and it also attempts to interpret squashed insects and footnotes
– to very strange effect.
* I am a dinosaur. I do not wish to share my books with all
my friends by installing them in a cloud or similar, I do not wish to browse my
collection by Genre or Playlist, unless the management software is really intuitive
and helpful. I like drag and drop and organised hierarchies of folders, and I
wish my portable device to be USB compatible, and to be recognised as a
detachable storage device by my computer when I plug it in.
* I do not care for iTunes or RealPlayer – mostly the software
for these is banned from our house. Also Creative’s software products – I have
a nice little Creative Zen mp3 player, which is almost ruined by the moronic
management software. These things, apart from being a pest to use, will usually
try to install a whole pile of stuff you don’t want, and make themselves the
default for every kind of file you use. Creative even re-installs itself after
you remove it...
* More positive – my wife has a Kindle and loves it. She
uses it properly, and downloads actual Kindle books, and it is great. It will
pay for itself all over again this year when we go away on holiday. We do not
know how to install pdf’s on it, and somehow it would feel wrong to have to ask
Amazon if it’s all right to download a book which has nothing to do with them.
The newer Kindles look even better, though I do not wish to have one which
thinks it might be a tablet. I need to find out how easy/possible it is to
install my dirty old French memoirs on a Kindle, without passing through my
Amazon account and without straining my poor brain, which is almost full.
* There are books available from Sony’s own eBook store, but
they are expensive, not very interesting, and the range and scope seems to be
much less than was expected a few years ago. Not a promising source.
* For a little while, it seemed to me that tablets might be
the future of reading books on screen. The drag and drop and file management
arrangements look about right, screen clarity is excellent – I really thought
that tablets might blow the Kindle (etc) market out of the water, but it
doesn’t seem to have happened yet. The trade-off between portability and
readability is tricky, and a decent tablet is potentially a bit large, a bit
fragile and definitely a bit expensive to shove in your pocket just so you can
read a book on the train.
* Of course, I have a friend who tells me that he always has
some books installed on his iPhone. Only in his more relaxed moments will he
admit that he finds them very difficult to read, and therefore doesn’t use this
facility. Bong! [i-Idiot alert]
* It is very unlikely that G4 will ever make it this far out
into the forest...
* This morning I watched a couple of YouTube reviews on
using Kindle with pdf’s, and they were quite frank about the fact that a 9-inch
tablet or a Sony reader (not the one I’ve got, I guess) are a much better
option, because of slow refresh and memory issues.
 |
| Dirty old French book - no wonder they say I'll go blind |
I think some kind of vague idea of what I would like is
taking shape. Ideally, I would like to find some miraculous way to make my
existing PRS-505 into all the things I hoped it would be. Failing that, I
really like the format and clarity of the new Kindles – particularly the PaperWhite,
but have not yet read anything that assures me that I will be able to shift pdf’s
of Marmont’s Memoires and Sarrazin’s
history of the Peninsular War from my desktop computer to the device, and be
able to read them comfortably if/when they get there.
Given a Kindle, I’m sure I could also occasionally find
something available in Kindle format which I was interested in, and buy it for
download in the approved manner. Despite my traditional anti-Apple (for
example) posturing, I have a fairly open mind about what sort of device I need,
though the cost and practicality have to make sense. Some of the received
wisdom online appears to suggest that what I really want for this role is a
cheap 9-inch tablet – Nexus? Could this just be the next white elephant? Hmmm.
If anyone can understand what I’m on about here and can
offer a little advice (preferably based on actual experience rather than statements
of faith from the Apple Chapel, for example), I shall really be very grateful.
Embarrassingly so, perhaps.
