Just purchased 505, thanks for the pointers!

[bvonhandorf]

I just wanted to thank everyone for the good information all over this site. I was kind of out in the weeds, trying to figure out what worked and what didn't until I stumbled upon the forums and the wiki. This site is a great resource for us newbies!

The other day I finally bit the bullet and went and bought myself a PRS-505 as an "open box" at the local Sony Style store. I spent quite a while sitting there with the 600 and the 505 right next to each other and decided the 505 was the better deal for me... plus I'm a fan of hardware buttons over things like finger-swipes. After fighting with the Sony Library software on Windows 7 (And finding the solution (Set Vista compatibility) on another thread here) and flashing the Firmware to the latest version, I was up and running.

I'm mostly reading PDFs of software development books, so I needed the decent PDF support and reflow, but I couldn't cost-justify one of the larger readers. (My eyesight is still pretty much OK, so I can usually at least read everything landscape, half a page at a time.) So far, a hundred or so more pages into the book I was reading and I'm nothing but pleased (with the reader... the software is still pretty bad, but at least there's Calibre). If I need to zoom in to read a passage, it works out quite well. Sure, the code blocks get reflowed a little oddly and annotations off in the left or right margins wind up in strange places, but once you get used to it, it's entirely readable.

BTW: Everyone else who cares is probably aware of this, but for other people looking for good technical books, Manning (which publishes the "In Action" and "In Depth" series of books) has (I believe) everything that they publish available in PDF on their site for a reasonable discount over paper... which wound up being enough to finally push me over the edge to get an eReader. So far, the book I'm reading (C# in Depth) has been a great read.

Thanks again for the great site!