If you could change some things on the 505, what would it be?

[sealbeater]

Originally Posted by astra

I believe that the reader is not powerful enough to do it?
It was not designed for that. I think they could make it as powerful as your notebook, but then reader's battery life would be 5-6 hours instead of 2 weeks?

Oh, it's powerful enough. Any problems are software, not hardware related. I recently posted a message about how I got several thousand books to load on mine, and I haven't noticed any difference in my battery life at all.

[vivaldirules]

I would rather like to have, let's see, how should I put this.....

MORE BOOKS!!!


Seriously, I see no important deficiency with the 505 aside from the lack of available ebooks to read with it. I don't want either new hardware or new software. I just want to buy the books I want to read which is something that Sony clearly doesn't care about. Anyone want to trade their Kindle for my Sony?

[ProDigit]

Originally Posted by vivaldirules

MORE BOOKS!!!

I think sony's already on it's way to really answer your question there!
Eventhough they need to hurry up a bit.
Saying by the end of the year they'll have about 100.000 booksmade me wonder.
Today they're little over half of that (just counted all the books in the bookstore by adding the number of books found in each category).
It seems Sony on this day only has 50.163 books for sale, and 1.231 smallbooks.

That's not even 52% of their goal by the end of the year!

But you'll spend a hell of a time reading through them all!

On top of that there are the Gutenberg books,which consist of about 30.000 converted english ebooks for the Sony, and an additional few thousand non-english books...
And then there's this program which can convert many online html, txt, and so books..

[dhbailey]

The other factor in getting anyone's favorite authors and books in Sony format (or Kindle or any other ebook format, for that matter) is the publishers and authors themselves. Many of the older and bigger names control electronic rights to their works while newer or smaller names do not, but even if the author is willing to let electronic forms of their books come out, the publisher has to be willing.

I think another factor in this whole mix is that Amazon has amazing market pressure it can bring to bear on a publisher -- "Let us release a version for the Kindle or we'll stop selling all your books" sort of strong-arm tactics. Sony has no such clout and so has to rely on business persuasion of the "once the book is converted you have no investment, just sit back and let the ebook profits roll in" sort.

I've contacted all my current authors by email and have gotten responses ranging from "Over my dead body!" to "I'd love to but my publisher doesn't want to" to "Wow, you say there's an ebook version of one of my novels out there? I need to call my publisher because I wasn't aware of that at all!"

The availability of content isn't always up to the distributor!

[ProDigit]

I wonder if an author of a book would get the same reward for an e-book as for a p-book.
I mean, for p-books it's easy! Print 10.000, sell 5.000 to company one, 2.000 to company 2.
E-books are not all that traceable. For what's worth, Amazon may be buying 100 ebooks, and selling 1000.

I mean, who's checking up on that?

[radius]

Originally Posted by ProDigit

Ofcourse we all want a bigger screen or higher resolution. so appart from that.

Wow, I can't believe the number of people who don't care about higher resolution...

My number one complaint is the screen. The Reader has many tradeoffs (like slow refresh time, screen inversion on page flip, ghosting, inverted "edges" around shapes etc) to support the e-ink screen compared to greyscale LCD, but advantages they gained from making those tradeoffs aren't enough yet.

If they quadrupled the resolution (ie: 1600x1200) it would then really approximate paper print. As it is today, its still too easy to make out the individual pixels on the display, and "stuck" pixels are large enough to be easily visible.

Increased resolution would also allow the fonts to be rendered more beautifully. On today's screen, its difficult to use font sizes smaller than 9pt because there aren't enough pixels available to draw the glyphs attractively.

Having higher pixel density would also allow better looking pictures, even if they can't raise the number of grey levels.

Now of course, this is only if they can hold everything else constant or better (eg need faster processors to process/render more pixels, which needs more battery; and more switching for screen, which needs more battery; more memory to hold framebuffer, which needs more battery)

[astra]

Originally Posted by radius

If they quadrupled the resolution (ie: 1600x1200) it would then really approximate paper print. As it is today, its still too easy to make out the individual pixels on the display, and "stuck" pixels are large enough to be easily visible.

Are you talking about eInk or LCD?
I have PRS-500 and PRS-505. Could you please teach me how to see the pixels and the stuck pixels please?

[Valloric]

Originally Posted by radius

If they quadrupled the resolution (ie: 1600x1200) it would then really approximate paper print. As it is today, its still too easy to make out the individual pixels on the display, and "stuck" pixels are large enough to be easily visible.

Exactly what Reader are you using? To me the screen is great, and no, I can't make out the individual pixels and have never seen a "stuck" pixel.

The only area the screen needs improvement in is contrast. Sure, improvements like size, resolution, colors etc are all nice and good, but when it comes to actual improvement in reading experience over the screen in the PRS-505, better contrast is on the top of my list.

All that being said, the screen as it is now is perfectly acceptable IMO.

[Fiacha]

Without changing the hardware, I'd like to to see:-
1 Better organization of books
a Currently Reading page with a means to remove titles
a Genre/Subject list
a Series entry sorted by sequence number

2 Reformatting as a background process. Whenever nothing else is going on, it can be building any tables that were not included in the download. You might get a spinning circle for the first book you open after loading up the reader, but the rest should be done by the time you open the next book.

3. Allow a generic USB charger to charge the device.

If you want to see ideas for redesigned hardware.

I want the same amount of text display area that I get with a standard paperback and I want it at the current dpi, if not higher. That would mean a screen that is 1100x600 and no space at the bottom for controls, but moving the controls to the edge would woek for me. A non-reflective treatment for the display would be nice.

Offer a USB remote control - either a simple control pad or a full keyboard.

Offer a clamshell chassis, controls in one half, display in the other.

Offer a dual screen device. In normal mode, use the next/prev page buttons to update each page in turn, i.e. no more pause in reading while the screen updates. In comparison mode, each screen is independent and can be a view on the same book at a different place or a view of a separate book. A touch screen could double as a control pad/keyboard. Lots of scope but the doubled hardware would make it very expensive.

[radius]

Originally Posted by astra

Are you talking about eInk or LCD?
I have PRS-500 and PRS-505. Could you please teach me how to see the pixels and the stuck pixels please?

I'm not sure if you are being sarcastic or not, but I was talking about the eInk screen of the Sony PRS-505 (ie: the subject of this thread).

Have you ever closely studied the screen on your device? I think the pixels are very obvious, and don't know what to tell you except look harder If you look at the anti-aliased graphics (such as character glyphs) you can see the individual pixels easily on diagonal lines (in letters such as 'A' or 'y' and so on). If you look at characters with long vertical lines you can see that the last pixels on an edge are grey compared to the dark grey of the character's body because of the anti-aliasing.

Even more obviously, whenever the reader draws graphics which are not smoothed (such as the spinning arrows) the jagged edges show pixels easily.

For stuck pixels, that might have been a misnomer. I think I mean stuck "ink elements" because it looks as though there may be several of them in a single pixel. In any case, on my reader I have two of them which are always turned on, or black, no matter what is displayed. When I went back to the store for an exchange, the several others that I saw had the same issue.

[astra]

Well, you are the first one who complains about stuck pixels on eInk.
I do not see pixels and definitely have no stuck ones, because the latter refers to LCD panels. I also don't have any permanent black dots, probably you have a defective unit. When I just upgraded from 500 to 505, I noticed that although 505 screen is so much better, it looked liked as if someone spilled black sand all over white sheet. This visual illusion disappeared in about 2-3 months.

[RJ_Cruze_Jr]

I'd like to see mprovements to the software so the Reader displays characters like "ā" or "ū." The "view" feature in calibre displays those characters, but they show up as blank spaces on the Reader and in the Sony software. Like in David Weber's Oath of Swords, "Tomanāk" comes up as "Toman k." It's not a show-stopper; it's just annoying.

That, and for the Reader to be more stable when an SD card is installed, and not hiccup and lose bookmarks and collections at random. Mind you, I don't need to carry several hundred e-books around with me -- I'd just like to know that the option is there if ever I feel the urge to. And that the option is stable and bug-free.

[mjh215]

Some of my wants. (I can understand why some people want other things, but they would be a waste for me) Listed from most to least wanted:

• User Replaceable Battery.
• Better handling of large libraries. A nice hierarchical system would be great.
• I'm currently only using a 2GB SD card but it is my understanding that people have had alot of compatibility issues on 2+ cards. So if that is still the case I'd like to see better support of large format cards.
• Prefetching of memory card index and current book to internal memory to save on battery life.
• Increased contrast and resolution. I don't believe the 505's eInk looks bad, but with the purpose of mimicking real paper there is always room for improvement.
• Inline dictionary support would be nice.
• Larger screen if you could limit the overall impact on size and weight.
• Support for HTML and multiple levels of linking so one could use something like the portable wikipedia.
• Lower the weight without affecting quality of build.
• User Replaceable Battery.

Things I don't want (At least not at the cost of well, increasing the cost):

• WiFi and/or Bluetooth. I would rather see an expansion port for those options.
• Backlight or frontlight. Again, while I understand why people want it, I'd rather see it as an accessory.
• Touchscreen. I'm happy with well placed buttons. I'm not happy with increased battery usage and decreased contrast.

Another thing, Sony should just go ahead and hire Kovid. Not to ignore all the other people that have made Calibre possible and not to say I don't have certain issues with the software but the guy deserves it. Sony CalibreConnect 1.0 shipping with the next version of PRS-505 would be a huge improvement.

-MJ

[igorsk]

Originally Posted by RJ_Cruze_Jr

I'd like to see mprovements to the software so the Reader displays characters like "ā" or "ū." The "view" feature in calibre displays those characters, but they show up as blank spaces on the Reader and in the Sony software. Like in David Weber's Oath of Swords, "Tomanāk" comes up as "Toman k." It's not a show-stopper; it's just annoying.

The software doesn't need "improvement" for this - it's the fonts which are missing the necessary symbols.

[Kris777]

[QUOTE=Valloric;274213]What they could do is support folders, and then when you insert an SD card with 4GB of books, all in different folders, it would index the folders when you open them (and not recursively). So, you have a large ebooks folder, and in it hundreds of folders, each one for a different author. You open an author folder, the Reader detects there are files in it and not just other folders, and then it indexes those files/books.
QUOTE]

Sounds like jetBook description with only one exception - the maximum size of SD card - 2GB.