[diamante]

In an earlier post, I mentioned that in my experience the Kindle is a little bit better than the Sony at taking you immediately to the correct dictionary entry. Let me be more specific. The Kindle does better with plurals and other inflected forms. With the Sony, sometimes if you double-click on a plural noun, the dictionary tells you "No entry found." You then have to go through a series of taps to manually enter the desired term, usually by subtracting letters from the end of the word you clicked on.

To compare dictionary functionality, I put the same e-book on my Sony and on my Kindle and set both devices to use the New Oxford American Dictionary. I tried to look up the hyphenated term "four-square" on both. On the Kindle, I simply positioned the cursor before the word, and the definition of "four-square" popped up instantly. On the Sony, I double clicked near the hyphen and got the definition for "four" -- not what I wanted. So I double clicked on "four," dragged to the end of "square" and released the stylus. The result: "No entry found." At this point I have to click on "manual entry" and delete the hyphen. The Sony then goes to the correct entry. I think it's fair to say that a dictionary should be able to cope with hyphens if it contains hyphenated entries, but unfortunately the current Sonys can't.

Another example: Both the Kindle and the Sony immediately go to the correct entry for "parties." Obviously, the desired entry is "party." However, within the full definition for "party" the word "manipulations" appears, in the usage example "I felt a wave of revulsion at the manipulations I'd been party to." With the Kindle, if you position the cursor before "manipulations" you immediately get the definition of "manipulate." With the Sony, you get "No entry found" and you're back to searching manually. You delete the final s, but "manipulation" is not found either. The Sony doesn't give you a result until you also delete the n and the o, at which point it gives you "manipulating," which redirects to "manipulate." To me, this is a pretty significant difference in functionality.

Again, the Sonys also come with some excellent translation dictionaries. For some people, having these references alone could justify the $129 cost of the Sony Reader Pocket Edition. The official availability of foreign-language dictionaries for the Kindle is limited. I know that a couple of Merriam-Webster translation dictionaries are available for Spanish and French, but these have a relatively small number of entries and I would not recommend them. There are quite a few Mobipocket dictionaries available however, and these include monolingual dictionaries like the Diccionario de la Lengua Española de la Real Academia Española, in addition to some good translation dictionaries from Harrap's, Vox, and Cambridge Klett. The comprehensive Oxford Spanish and French dictionaries that come with the Sony to my knowledge have not been published in Mobipocket or Kindle format. I wouldn't recommend the Oxford Mobipocket dictionaries that are currently on the market for Spanish and French, as they are pocket editions. Mobipocket dictionaries can be made to work on the Kindle, by means that most of us have heard about by now. Because of the software modifications Amazon made for the "popup" definitions on the Kindle, however, you will probably not get the popup, on-page definitions for dictionaries other than the ones that Amazon supplies with the device. Unfortunately I don't think there is a good monolingual French dictionary available in Mobipocket or Kindle format (veering slightly off topic, let me also recommend that French speakers check out Franklin's new BFS-2160, which is excellent if a little old-fashioned). And that is about the extent of my knowledge of dictionaries for the Kindle and the new Sony Readers.

UPDATE: I recently noticed a useful dictionary feature on my Sony 350. If you double-click on a word for which there is a corresponding entry in the dictionary, the dictionary suggests the first corresponding entry. If there are more corresponding entries, it also displays a small icon that looks like a bulleted list. If you click on this icon, you get a list of other entries that begin with the letters in the word you clicked on. For example, if you look up might and click on the "list" icon, you get a list of entries that includes terms like might-have-been and mighty. This provides an alternative way of looking up hyphenated terms like the example "four-square" I used above. Instead of selecting the entire term and deleting the hyphen, you can just double-click on the word before the hyphen, click the "list" icon, and select the term you are looking for from the list. The list is limited to 100 items, which may not be enough to reach the term you are looking for without adding more letters to your search term. It took me a while to notice this feature; the "list" icon is rather easy to miss in my opinion.