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It's important to understand that the Sony and the CyBook use their battery in very different ways.
When used for reading, both devices use pretty much the same amount of power.
When you "turn off" the Sony, it doesn't turn off, but just goes into a "sleep mode" in which it continues to use a small amount of power. It will drain a fully-charged battery in around 2.5-3 weeks in this mode if not used. It "starts up" very quickly in this mode - in about 2 seconds. There is a menu item which will genuinely power it off, but startup "from cold" generally takes a couple of minutes, depending how many books you have on the machine.
With the CyBook, on the other hand, when you turn it off, it genuinely does turn off, and uses no battery power, other than the normal slow discharge of any Lithium Ion battery. You can leave it for a month, and it will have pretty much the same battery charge, when you turn it on, as it did when it was switched off. However, the consequence of this is that it "boots" every time you turn it on, and that takes about 25-30 seconds.
If you leave the CyBook turned on - which some people prefer to do - a battery charge will last about 4 days. A good compromise is to switch it off at night, but leave it turned on during the day if you know that you'll be reading in several sessions. There's a useful "auto power-off" facility to aid you with this, which you can configure to switch the machine off after a period of inactivity ranging from 10 minutes to 4 hours (or disable it altogether).
Both machines, however, have battery lives which are sufficiently long that for most people it is a complete non-issue.
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