[Amadeus]

I've now had my Reader for about 10 days, so I thought I post a few comments on the experience so far.

Reader Hardware – the screen is good, not quite as contrasty as I expected, but easy to read with sufficient light. Not looking for a backlight – paper books don’t have backlights. Also not bothered about lack of colour. Ghosting is a little disappointing, but not a problem when reading. Overall I’m pretty pleased with the hardware and the build quality is better than expected.

Lack of Search – this would have been nice, but is not essential. Again, it’s something you don’t have in a paper book. At least hyper links are implemented, so if these are used in the creation of the electronic text you can just jump from the contents or index to the page you want.

Page turns – it would be nice if the 2 seconds flash on turning pages could be improved, but again this isn’t really much different from the experience of reading a paper book, once you get used to it.

Case – the textured vinyl case is nicer than I expected, and looks like it will wear well. For additional protection from dust, I bought a black toilet bag for £1 from Tesco and removed the drawstrings so I can just slip the Reader inside and fold it over.

File Support – yes, it’s good to have .RTF and .TXT support, but lack of HTML support is a sin. We also need to see more options for Acrobat .PDF support, particularly reflowing of text and more font size options.

Memory – If you only want to carry a few dozen compact texts around with you, the included memory of up to 96Mb is fine. However, my plan had always been to carry my entire collection of texts around with me. My wife is Cuban and we often travel to spend a month or two at a time with her family. Normally I have to take a load of paper books, without really knowing what I will feel like reading while I’m in Cuba. I currently have 6000 e-books in Spanish and about the same number in English, so I was pleased to see that both SD and Memory Stick formats are supported. However, the manual is vague on exactly what memory will work. I mistakenly assumed that any 4Gb Sony Memory stick would be supported, but it seems that the High Speed version of the Pro Duo is not, although the regular one is. I only found this out after digging around and finding a somewhat confusing Memory Stick support page on Sony’s site. I now need to try and sell a 4Gb High Speed Pro Duo stick which I bought in error.

Library Management – Anyone in their right mind would expect that Sony would support some kind of directory structure for the organisation of files. This is not the case – the only structures supported are “Collections”, but – get this – only on the internal memory of the Reader! So, I can transfer my 12000 books to the memory stick, but then they just appear in one big list of 1200 pages to wade through on the Reader! Appalling implementation! What is the point of supporting memory sticks of 4Gb or more when you cannot make use of any directory structure?

USB Support – the Reader only support USB 1.1. I guess somebody figured that with only a small amount of internal memory the speed of USB 2.0 would not be required. This is a classic example of how Sony misunderstands the requirements of its users. If there is only 96Mb of memory, chances are that users will want to transfer books back and forth more frequently, so a higher speed is important. I cannot believe that it was any simpler or cheaper to implement only USB 1.1 rather than version 2.0 protocol. And then what about those of us who have 4Gb memory sticks? Then there is the issue of how USB is implemented. The Reader does not come up simply as a USB Mass Storage Device – rather, the only way of transferring content is by using the Connect Reader application on a PC. Unfortunately my office network will not let me install this, so if I want to copy books from work to the Reader I have to take out the memory stick and attach it to a suitable reader on the PC. But then Sony says that if I copy files this way rather than importing them via the Connect Reader software, they will not be indexed properly and will take longer to open on the Reader. Great.

Connect Reader PC application – this really is dreadful. It’s very slow and uses non-standard window elements. The integrated bookstore uses the Internet Explorer functionality of Windows, so if your regular browser is something else (like Firefox in my case) and you don’t have IE set up properly, then it won’t work. You can only buy and download books from the Connect store using this software – not in a standalone browser, but there are many problems - like the search box you get at the top of the home page in a regular browser does not appear, so you have to first select a category and then search within this. Then there is no option to sync libraries between the Reader and the PC. On several occasions when I have been transferring files to the Reader, the whole lot has crashed. I’ve had to disconnect the Reader and use the reset button on the back to do a soft reset. I could go on, but before you even buy the Reader you can download and install this software for free, so you’ll see what I mean.

Digital Rights Management – I am not a fan of DRM generally, because it is claimed to be for the benefit of copyright owners when in reality it is often used to limit and control what would normally be reasonable use by buyers. For example, if I buy a paper book I can read it and then sell it to someone else for perhaps half the price I paid for it. There is nothing in existing copyright law that prevents me from doing this. But Sony doesn’t want me to do it with books from their Connect store. Instead they want to sell me a book for about 75% of its printed price, which I can then do nothing else with after reading. This by comparison looks expensive. I would do better to buy a paper copy and then sell it when I’ve read it. Of course, Sony’s fear is that if ebooks can be sold on this will mean fewer first-hand sales from the Connect store, but this is wrong thinking. The average user will have a monthly budget he is prepared to spend on ebooks – say $50 to $100. If he can sell these on after reading them, then he will have more available to spend on first-hand downloads. I therefore believe that by allowing books to be sold on this will encourage people to buy more and actually increase sales from the Connect store.

Summary and Suggestions for Sony – Overall I like the device, but I hate the way much of the software has been implemented (or not). If Sony really wants to see this device used properly they should release all the source code and encourage developers to adapt and improve both the Reader OS and the PC host application. I would actually like to see the Connect Reader running as a Java app within a browser, rather than the other way round as it is at present. It would be multi-platform and would run in most environments without the need to install anything other than the usual Java support.

But apart from this, the priorities are: -

- Support for directory browsing is essential – FIX THIS NOW!!!!
- Add support for HTML – this is a no-brainer.
- Allow selling-on of protected content. Sony could charge $1 to transfer from one device to another, make money this way and encourage more sales.
- Support syncing between host and Reader. I just want to connect the Reader to my PC and sync all content both ways without messing around.