http://farragut.flameeyes.is-a-geek.org/articles/2007/12/31/looking-for-comments-about-sonys-reader-prc-505-and-linux asks Hoosgot,
Dear lazyweb, this time I am asking for opinions and comments, rather than writing my own
Today I’ve been trying to clean up my home office, and I seen how many reference books I have that I could have downloaded, or at least bought, in PDF format, rather than printed or bought in solid paper form. While I’m quite a bookworm and would probably continue buying novels in solid paper form, I’m considering an electronic paper device for technical references (which are also those who take more space in my library at the moment). I was suggested more than once the Sony Reader.. while I don’t really find myself a Sony fan, I can see they are quite advanced …
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1 response so far ↓
1 dsifry // Dec 31, 2007 at 2:00 pm
I have the earlier version, the PRS-500. It’s quite nice, and I use it a lot. It often sounds like a miracle device, especially for reading PDFs, but I’ve had problems with PDFs and display of fonts on the screen, often the antialiasing of the Sony screen makes the default fonts hard to read oftentimes, so I have to play with the files, reprocess them to make everything readable. My experience is that it handles RTF files really well, making everything very readable, but that means you lose diagrams and the like.
The other thing is that the Sony Store is Windows only, and you’ll need a windows box to get things set up the first time, I think. I use macs as my primary boxes, and linux as well - there are programs available to make the sony appear to be a flash drive, and you can add/remove files from it that it then understands.
All in all I’ve been quite happy with the device, it goes in my travel bag when I need some thin reading material. The biggest issues are its software connection, DRM system (which you get around by putting ASCII, RTF’s and PDFs on it, thank you Project Gutenberg!)
The other issue with the 500 was the page left and right button, but I understand that interface issue is fixed with the 505…
Good luck!
Dave
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