My Review after 3 months

[BrokenBird]

I have been reading books electronically format for the past five years, I started with a HP iPaq and for the last 2 years on my Axim x51v, I just loved it and even bought books that I already had in paperback or hardcover.

The problem with those devices was the screen, it was too damn small, I upgraded from the iPaq to the Axim to get a bigger screen, but it was still small. Then the Sony PRS-500 came, the perfect size.

The eInk display
First off let me talk about the now famous eInk display, there has been a lot of hype about it everywhere in every blogs I read, but believe me it is true, it is almost unbelievable when you look at the screen you think someone put a piece of printed paper on it for a joke.

One thing to note is that this is not like a PDA; there is no backlight on the screen, which means you can't read in the dark. However, unlike a PDA you can read in full sunshine.

The file formats
When you have been using eBooks for quite a while like me you tend to have quite a library, and since I have been reading on PocketPC all my eBooks were in Microsoft Reader format which the PRS-500 didn’t support. However there is quite a large community of developers out there that have an interest in the Sony Reader, and a lot of file conversion tools are available. See: https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/E-book_conversion

I spent the better part of the last 2 weeks’ evenings converting and tweaking files. I found that files converted to HTML then to BBeB makes the best books.

I would recommend that you stay away from PDF. The device will display those files, but they are barely readable. I spent a lot of time trying to tweak PDF files to make them better but nothing was satisfactory. There is hope, Alex_D made a tool that process PDF documents and make them much more readable, see: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...?threadid=9173

The Software
Sony Connect software is somehow extremely basic in its functionality; I guess this can be good for non-technical people. Basically it is just a front end to the Connect store and a file organizer, and even in that category it is really bad.

What it should do but doesn’t
When you start reading eBooks you tend to have a lot of them, and when I say a lot, I mean a few hundred very quickly. Which means you want means to organize them in an efficient manner, but the Connect software won’t let you do any of that? It does provide you with “Collections” but those will work only for the main memory not the SD card (which is where most of your books will reside).

What is needed is a librarian; we should be able to classify our books by genre, authors, series, etc…

The Reader itself is not better in that regard; there is only 3 ways to see the list of books, by name, by author or by Collection (again internal memory only). Even this poor choice is very badly implemented, when you select by Author, you would expect to see a list of authors, and then when you choose an author you would see his books, however that is not what you get, By Author simply means all the books are shown ordered by author, that is still 30 pages of book list to go thru.

What I want to see it:
· By Name (they have that one covered)
· By Author (they need to redesign that one)
· By Genre (again, list the genre, not all the books)
· By Collection (make it for SD card as well)