Between grad school, teaching, and trying to write I’m finding very little time to read. I’m still working my way through Royal Harlot by Susan Holloway Scott. It’s not my usual type of read, but I’m enjoying it well enough. Of course I’m reading it on my Sony Reader, having downloaded it from the Sony eBook Store.
I got quite a few great gifts for Christmas this year, including a new case with built in booklight for my SonyReader. I was skeptical about adding another pane of glass over the eink screen, but it really is a better option for reading in lower light than any of the clip-on book lights. It is a bit pricy, but hey, it was a present.
As regular readers will remember, my beloved mp3 player died a few weeks ago. One of the reasons for my purchase of the Sony Reader was its ability to play mp3s. The internal memory of the PRS-505 is a tiny 256 megs, but there are two memory card slots– one for a Sony Memory Stick and one for an SD card.
Books take up very little memory. I now have 320 books on my reader and have filled up only a teeny pie slice of one data card. Mp3s on the other hand use a bit o’ memory, so I bought a 2 gig Sony Memory Stick Pro Duo, and a 4 gig SDHC card. So far I have only a dozen or so songs loaded but I have room for almost as many as I had on my GoGear. Note: The Sony Reader will play mp3s, but not wma files.
I read on my Sony Reader all the time, but I’ve only plugged in earbuds once or twice. The sound is top notch, but I’m so into my reading that I forget all about the music.
Addition: I plugged my Reader into my speaker system to listen to music last night and it stopped twice– once at the end of a song and once in the middle. I’ve got to check it out and see if there is something wrong with those two particular mp3s.
I’ve mentioned Feedbooks http://www.feedbooks.com/ before. It is a great source for free ebooks. As I click over today, I see the four featured books are Moonfleet by J. Meade Faulkner, Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells, and On the Origin of the Species by Charles Darwin. Pretty cool, huh? You can of course find tens of thousands of other books on the site as well. But if you click on one of these titles, you will be given the choice of downloading them in one of six different formats– epub, Mobipocket/Kindle, PDF, SonyReader, iLiad, Custom PDF. Now the Sony Reader will read the epub, and both types of pdfs, but if you have one, you would naturally click on the SonyReader choice. This in fact does not give you a native Sony file. It gives you a pdf formatted for the Sony Reader. This is fine, and it works great, but by using Calibre (see yesterday’s post) you can convert the file into a native Sony lrf.
I love my new Sony PRS-505 book reader. I’m not going to get involved in the format wars. I considered a Kindle before I bought my Sony after all, and I gave that up back in 1985 when I bought my Amiga. What I will tell you is that you won’t be disappointed in a digital book reader if you are a book lover. They are great. I’ve been reading much more than I have in a long time.
If you buy a Sony Reader, you must download the Calibre program. You can get it here. This program allows you to convert just about any ebook format into the native Sony format. In fact, the ebooks converted this way can be created with all the possible features enabled, such as hotlinked tables of contents. Though the reader displays pdf files just fine, I find that I can make them easier to read by converting them with Calibre. I can change the font size and set up a table of contents in about twenty seconds.
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.
City of Amathar 