The electronic book reader, a hand-held gadget that would store a whole collection of digital books and other material, has always seemed like a good idea. But nobody has been able to pull it off.
This month, Sony has given it a good shot with a sleek, attractive $350 device called the Sony Reader.
The Reader can hold about 75 books at one time in its internal memory and can accept add-on memory cards to expand its capacity. In addition to books, the Reader can store and display Microsoft Word documents, text files and Adobe PDF files.
I’ve been testing a Sony Reader for about a week and have been evaluating not just the hardware itself, but the whole system. That includes the PC software that downloads and organizes thematerial as well as Sony’s new online bookstore.
My verdict is mixed. The Reader is a handsome device with a stunning black-and-white screen and terrific battery life. But it has some serious limitations. The software, called the Connect Reader, is simple and plain, but effective. The online bookstore, called the Connect eBook store, has only a modest selection.
The key feature of the Reader is its high-contrast, but low-power, six-inch screen, which is quite different from the screens on laptops. Unlike those power-hungry displays, the Reader uses a new technology called Electronic Paper from Massachusetts company E Ink. This screen needs no backlighting and consumes no power until you electronically turn a page.
The contrast between the black text and the light-gray background isn’t as good as on a paper book, but it’s easy on the eyes and makes the Reader usable even in bright sunlight.
Because it uses so little power, the Reader has strong battery life. Most people could go days, even weeks, without having to recharge.
The Reader’s screen can’t display color and is only fair at graphics because it has just four levels of gray. So photos appear in gray, and titles that make heavy use of charts and graphics don’t display well.
The electronic books cost less than print or audio versions. I bought Bob Woodward’s “State of Denial” from Sony for $13.59. Amazon.com charges $17 for the print and audio editions. But in at least one of the books, George Orwell’s “1984,” which comes free on every Reader, I found typos that were inexcusable.
In my tests, Word documents looked OK, if not perfectly faithful to their layouts. But the Reader’s claim to display PDF documents proved hollow. In every PDF document I tried, the text was nearly unreadable and the text resizing feature of the Reader didn’t help. Sony concedes that PDF documents work well on the Reader only if they are created for the Reader’s screen size and resolution. But it includes no conversion software to make them fit.
Another big disappointment: The Reader lacks a bunch of features that would enhance the reading experience. You can’t enter notes, search inside books or documents, or look up words in a built-in dictionary. And while you can bookmark pages for later retrieval, you can’t highlight passages.
The Reader software was fine at organizing and transferring books, and at importing your own documents, music and photos to your PC, then transferring them to the device. But it doesn’t automatically synchronize material.
Overall, I’d call the Sony Reader a good start – impressive in some ways, but clearly a work in progress.
Walter Mossberg writes about personal technology for The Wall Street Journal.
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