Spaced Out ::

I’ve been testing the Sony Reader…. an ebook reader (doh!) as part of a trial at Kingston in to their use. Having already used the Kindle for reading and marking I was interested to see how Sony’s offering stacked up. At near £200 it’s a fair bit more expensive, but it has a higher quality (aka gorgeous design!) and offers a touch interface. It’s funny because after using my Android phone on a daily basis, whenever I switch to the Kindle I’m expecting to touch the screen to navigate…. it seems just natural. Sony goes for resistive technology on the screen which therefore allows you to make annotations using the stylus…. and because its reisitive you can make accurate handwritten notes. So that’s definitely a benefit, although it requires an extra layer of glass on the device so making it both heavier and reducing the crispness of the image. In practice the latter is noticeable.

How useful is this?? Well if you are researching a topic or reviewing a journal paper then it could be handy; akin to scribbling over the paper version. For student marking? I’m not convinced because you somehow have to translate all the notes in to a format for the students to access. Easier to make them handwritten.

However the biggest gotcha is the PDF reading. Yes you can rotate the screen and view in landscape, but unlike the Kindle, it doesnt maximise it to screen in quite such an intelligent way. That said it does try to reflow the text in to one of its preset zoom levels. I wanted to read somewhere between “Small” and “Medium” but you just can’t do it which means either tiny type or lots of page turning.

It does come with the benefit of an SD card slot, but there is no wifi (and so no web browser) and therefore book buying is a little more convoluted (you need to attached to your PC), although I haven’t tested it.

Those who have tested the Reader will realise that I’m using the PRS-600, not the latest PRS-650. The resistive screen is gone so I would expect the quality of the reading experience to be vastly improved. What all ebook readers need to achieve (for university use anyway) is a far better PDF experience.