i can only speak for the sony reader because that's all I have at this moment.
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Originally Posted by hockeynut
I am a programmer, looking for an eReader to use with programming reference books, PDF documents (all sorts), and the occasional read-for-pleasure book.
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The sony reader is very suitable for reading books containing mostly text (novels) and not so for books with lots of diagrams or where the formatting is important.
Even the new PDF scaling feature doesn't work very well for programming reference books; source code listing becomes messed up (making it hard to read), diagrams are shown out of place etc.
You could try converting pdf to lrf as images (with appropriate cropping / layout using programs like PDFRead or pdf2lrf), it actually makes references books much more readable. However, most people do not read reference books moving forward sequentially. You would usually want to backtrack a lot to locate certain contents that you've read, so the small viewing area and slow page turning would be testing your patience in the long run.
As some people have said above, I would recommend you to get the Iliad instead if you can afford it, unless cost is an important factor to you as well.
Overall I would give the sony reader:
8 / 10 - novels / dense text books
7 / 10 - programming and IT books
6 / 10 - science and math books
Quote:
Originally Posted by hockeynut
Available content is important - Amazon vs Sony store - who has the most/best content? From the publisher point of view, is one preferred to the other - meaning is this a VHS vs Betamax situation?
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Content-wise is not a problem as long as you don't mind getting it from 'ahem' source. Most PDFs can be viewed on the Sony Reader, although some might require conversion / pre-processing beforehand.
Quote:
Originally Posted by hockeynut
External storage is important - SD, CF, MS (duo) are all OK with me (I have plenty of 'em all!) If SD does it support SD-HC?
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PRS-505 with the latest firmware supports SDHC i think.