Sony Reader Now Available

Yaksha42 writes "The Sony Reader, which debuted at CES in January, is now available for purchase on the Sony website. The six inch screen uses E Ink, rather than an LCD, to display the text, reducing strain on the eye while reading. While you can buy books on Sony's Connect site, you can also load eBooks and other text onto the Reader in a variety of formats, including PDF and TXT files. It also comes with the ability to receive newsfeeds, display JPG images, and can play unsecured MP3 and AAC music files. Additional information can also be found on the Learning Center site."

Finally..

[anethema]

I've been following these e-ink readers since I've first read about the technology. I'm an avid reader and re-read all the books I enjoy many times. Having all my books available on a SD card in a reader which lasts like 20 books worth on a single charge, all while looking a lot like real paper is like a dream come true for me.

The main competition to this sony reader seems to be the Iliad from I-Rex. I think it is a much nicer reader for a couple reasons.

It has a nice page turn interface, it has a proper paperback A5 sized screen, and runs linux. There has already been quite a bit of hacking on it. Can code your own readers for various formats etc.

The downsize? It is like $850 instead of $350 of the sony :(

Guess I'm still stuck waiting till the iliad comes down in price or another reader comes out at a lower price point. These things are way to specialized for the price they are demanding.

Source code to GPL'd components

[Eric Smith]

Is on Sony's Source Code Distribution Service:

http://www.sony.net/Products/Linux/Download/catego ry3.html#2 [sony.net]

The older, Japan only model is there too. As well as various other interesting products.

Re:eBooks still to expensive!

[dan828]

alt.binaries.e-book might have content. I've heard. But don't download it.

Re:Creating still toO expensive!

[Anonymous Coward]

You left out one very important part. The type of book. An encyclopedia will require both more, and a different set of people than say the latest romance novel. Plus cost is also a function of demand. That's why a book for pediatricians is going to cost more than say a mass-produced dime store novel.

"All I'm saying is that it looks like, once again, media distroution companies are trying to wring every last cent out, rather than selling at a point that is both profitable and reasonable."

"Profitable" and "reasonable" aren't the same thing. For some things, "profitable" and "reasonable" are close enough to satisfy the majority. But don't assume that will always be the case.

Re:eBooks still to expensive!

[eviljav]

Try fictionwise for pdf versions of (some) books: http://www.fictionwise.com/ [fictionwise.com], and select "multiformat". I've bought a lot of books through there.

Re:eBooks still to expensive!

[Knothere]

Check out places like baen.com. I've bought quite a few of thier ebooks the day the hardback was released 5-6$. Seems like the old publisher, may he rest in peace, really wanted ebooks to take off. They also have a free library with a lot of titles. Go, read, feed the addiction.

Re:Academics

[dimension6]

I should warn you, as the owner of a Sony Librie (previous Japanese version, uses the same screen as the Reader I believe), that the screen (and resolution) is definitely too small to read a 8.5x11 or A4 .pdf document. For the Librie, I can convert the .pdf files into 2 pages for every 1 on the .pdf file, and that works pretty well. However, this means more flipping around, and at about a second per page turn, could be inconvenient for academic books.

The Iliad has a Wacom Tablet

[k2r]

build in.
The Sony does not have a pen-interface, AFAIK.
That's a lot of additional potential for the Iliad, let's see if their software leaves beta soon and whether they provide us with an appropriate SDK...

For Iliad-Discussion from iRex [irextechnologies.com] see forum.irexnet.com [irexnet.com]
For more independent info on both products see [mobileread.com]http://www.mobileread.com/ [mobileread.com] .

k2r

Re:PDF-s !?

[LordVader717]

Sarcasm. Their previous model only supported their own special format, and required things like PDFs or even TXTs to be converted with special software.

Re:The bookstore has more than just "regular" book

[TheRaven64]

It supports BBeB, PDF, .txt, RTF, Word files, JPEG, GIF, PNG and BMP. This covers _all_ document formats I would be interested in reading on the thing. What do you feel is missing and sufficiently important to make it "nearly useless"?

HTML? Most of the Gutenberg texts that have formatted versions are HTML.

Re:Good books need good typography

[TheRaven64]

For a novel, you need almost no LaTeX skill to typeset it. Put a preamble in looking like this:

\documentclass{book}
\title{A Book}
\author{A. Person}
\begin{document}
\maketitle

That will give you a titlepage of a book. LaTeX uses a double line-break as a paragraph-break, which I believe is also the standard for Gutenberg. The only other thing you need to do is mark up the chapter headings like this:

\chapter{A Chapter}

Then put this at the end of the document:

\end{document}

Save this as ebook.tex and then run the following command:

$ pdflatex ebook.tex

This will give you a typeset copy, ebook.pdf. There are other options you can play around with for default font sizes and page sizes.

I really don't know why PG didn't go with (a subset of) LaTeX for their base format. It's trivial to convert to their format with latex and dvi2tty, and also easy to convert to PDF, HTML, etc.

Re:The bookstore has more than just "regular" book

[testadicazzo]

yeah, good point. HTML is a no brainer. Wonder why they didn't support it? Still, I think "nearly useless" is far too strong a comment. Gutenberg text can be just as easily viewed as a text or pdf file.

Re:It still needs work

[Anonymous Coward]

>1) Two side-to-side screens, similar to a traditional book
Some Japanese company tried that. I don't think it did well.
>3) Longer battery life. Instead of wasting power on a CPU that can run an MP3 player, how about designing a product that shuts off entirely except when changing pages?
It does exactly this. You DON'T have to play mp3s on it while reading, you know. From a review:
"Power Management -- I know that is a very hot topic! I specifically asked what was running while the Reader is on, but not changing the display. The answer was almost nothing. The Reader is just monitoring the various buttons for presses, so its almost completely powered down between page turns -- as it should be! In almost five full hours of what could only be considered very hard usage (constantly opening files and flipping pages and playing sound files and so on), the battery meter did not budge, still reading fully charged at the end of the day."
>4) Some way to skip a lot of pages at once.
You can skip to 10%, 20% etc of the book by pressing numbered buttons. Holding prev/next page buttons makes it skip 10 pages a time. It can also follow links in PDF or BBeB (e.g. from the table of contents).