I've just done some quick benchmarking tests of various memory card types in the PRS-505 and assorted readers. I've used XBench on the Mac, and quoted the speed in megabytes per second for 256K block uncached reads and writes.

I don't know whether it is the internal card readers in the PRS-505, or the USB access, but it is disturbingly slow, even compared to a cheap USB reader. It's a pity there is no real way of getting an internal speed benchmark from it.


Memory Card Sandisk Extreme III 8GB MS Sandisk 2GB SD Sandisk 2GB Micro SD Sandisk Extreme IV 8GB CF
Reader Read Write Read Write Read Write Read Write
Sandisk Extreme FW 4.07 3.86 9.08 3.72 9.01 3.24 83.93 67.29
Trust USB 4.51 4.22 3.68 3.51 3.65 2.59
PRS-505 USB 1.90 1.58 2.40 1.70 2.56 1.83
Sony Express Card 38.33 35.04


Note : I used a Sony Memory Stick to CF adaptor, a generic unbranded SD to CF adaptor and a Sandisk Micro SD to SD adaptor where necessary.

This is useful info. Thanks. (I haven't received my reader yet, but I guess the slowness rumors are all true...)

They used a different chip in the 700, so the card reading time is really fast.

I usually only transfer one or two books at a time, so I have not noticed any slowness. I expect that it could get very annoying if I was transferring a large batch of files!

Do you really need to use a memory card? I found that I could comfortably carry 100+ books in the internal memory with no difficulty, with is about a year's reading for me.

Do you really need to use a memory card? I found that I could comfortably carry 100+ books in the internal memory with no difficulty, with is about a year's reading for me.

Examples of useful things, other than your current ebooks, that could be carried in a Reader:
- newspapers and magazines. (Also, you might often want to save articles for a little while, so wind up saving old issues.)
- Schedules, found in PDF, like from your gym or favorite sports team.
- Reference material for work.
- Deferred web reading, captured via Bookit.
- Operating manuals for your various devices and appliances.
- PDF publications. Like the 2009 Fuel Economy Guide, or tax publications.
- A surfeit of "good intentions" Classics.
- Tutorials. Technical, language-learning, etc.
- Dictionary(s).
- Religious texts (Bibles, Korans, etc.), even if you're not religious, just to look up stuff.
- etc.

It really depends on your preferences about information vs. overload and clutter.

After two weeks of ownership, I have come close to filling my PRS-505's internal memory, so have offloaded stuff to an SD card. That's with most of my ebooks not yet loaded.

Yeah I have a ton of .PDFs I want to carry with me for work purposes, many of which consist mainly of scanned images, some over 10 MB.