I posted not too long ago about my interest in the Amazon Kindle. Well my birthday came along and I had my choice of gadgets. What did I get?… The Kindle’s main competitor, the Sony Reader PRS-505. I don’t know why I decided to go with the Sony over the Kindle. It was just kind of a gut decision, but I’m not having any buyer’s remorse… at least no more than I would have for spending three Franklins on anything. So far I am loving the little Reader. I keep waiting for someone to ask me what I have there, so I can say “a book”. And then when they ask me which book, I’ll say “All of them.” You can expect that I’ll be posting a lot about the Reader over the next few weeks, but here is a quick rundown.

The reader is primarily a book reader. It’s screen is not backlit and it really is like reading a book. It also plays mp3 music though, and it sounds as good as my late lamented mp3 player. It displays pictures as well, though they are in black and white. It has a bit of memory built in– enough to hold 160 books, but not much if you want a bunch of music. However it has two memory slots: one for a Sony memory stick duo, and one for an SD memory card. It does support SDHC. I have a 4 meg SDHC and a 2 meg Sony stick in right now. You can buy ebooks using the supplied library software from the Sony/Borders website. You get 100 free classic books when you buy the reader. Free books can be found all over the web– from manybooks.com, feedbooks.com, and publishers’ websites. Baen books has a ton of great sci-fi for free download. You can’t pay to get newspapers delivered to your Reader like you can with the Kindle, but you can get the equivalent for free from feedbooks.com using their feedbooks News Stand software gadget.

Stay tuned for tips, tricks, and goodies as I discover them. I will surely post them.