[rmeister0]

Having had my PRS-500 for about two weeks now, I have come to the conclusion that this is a good piece of hardware hobbled by mediocre software and poor quality control on the content. Unfortunately, these two things could be sufficient to kill the product, particularly at the price.

To my mind, these are the things Sony must do, and had really better do soon:

Improve the book store. Browsing is a very painful experience; pages are slow to load, there is no way to sort titles by author name, and titles are frequently mis-categorized (and filing some titles in multiple categories would not be a bad thing).

If you sort a list of titles while browsing by anything other than "relevance", and then select a book to view its detail...and then back arrow to the list of titles, that list resets itself to sorted by "relevance". How I wish I could right-click and select "open in new tab". A drill-down would be nice: genre/category, author, then titles by that author.

And for heaven's sake, if you're going to carry books that are part of a series...give the poor customer some idea what order the books are supposed to be in.

Add a freakin wish list feature if you aren't going to make browsing easy.

And by the way, why am I not getting an e-mail every week announcing new titles for sale...the way someone like Fictionwise does?

Improve the Connect software. The user interface is slow and sluggish...even on a quad-core Xeon with 2 gb RAM!

Improve the presentation of books. Given that the frame of the reader itself makes nice margins...and given that the screen is most likely the most expensive component of the reader...why, oh why are we wasting so much screen real estate on margins? At least take the left and right edges of the page close to the edge of the screen.

Proofread the books. I'm currently reading Steven Levy's new book, and I'm shaking my head. It isn't as if Penguin is a shoe-string operation; but I am wondering if Sony is doing the conversions to BeB rather than the publishers. I keep seeing gaffes like "soft ware" (consistently!), "Thei Pod", and other such wackiness. The Del Rey Conan titles still have the line art in them - but reproduced to a fraction of the screen's size, and are little more than blobs or scribbles. It is one thing to put up with poor proofreading from second tier publishers (eReads, Renaissance and Rosetta being the bad offenders in this regard), but I expect better from a major publisher who wouldn't let these things into print.

My bottom line is this: the Reader costs a significant premium over simply continuing to buy books on paper, and there is frequently no cost incentive for purchasing an electronic edition over a paper edition. That being the case, it would be in Sony's best interests to make the shopping experience and the presentation quality of the content as superb as possible. Unfortunately, the only thing Sony seems to have learned from the iTunes Music Store is that rectangles should have rounded corners.