Help me justify an upgrade...

[Tectonic]

Give your 500 to a friend or a family member. Then it's not an upgrade, you'll just need something to read books

[lilac_jive]

Originally Posted by Tectonic

Give your 500 to a friend or a family member. Then it's not an upgrade, you'll just need something to read books

Muahaha! Perfect!

[olddumbguy]

I bought my 505 about 2.5 months ago and havent read a pbook since. I've absolutely been in love.

My folks are also readers and would never buy this on their own. So, today I bought the 700 with the excuse to my wife that I will be giving the 505 to my folks. I'm putting them on my account and setting up the library on the SD card for them before I give it to them. I'm pretty certain they will be buying one so they both have one.

In the last few hours I've had a chance to get to know my new 700, I think its very sexy with the black cover and black face. The interface is fine, page turns are fast and the contrast doesnt bother me in the least.

I am concerned about battery life because I like to use a light and I think I'll be using the built in light alot.

[chili_666]

Thanks for all your replies.

I don´t think that the fast evolving market-thing is a valid point. If I would always consider this I never would upgrade my computer hardware, buy a new car or even cell phone. There is always something new and supposedly better just around the corner.

I have used calibre for the past week and imported all my books into it. It is true, pagination takes ages on a 500. This alone might be worth it, because the sony software is one of the worst pieces of code I have ever had to use. Calibre is just a breeze to work with, makes it easy to update meta data and the cover view gives me the same feeling as selecting from my book shelves.

I thought long and hard about my usage profile and found out:

• I almost never read in brightly lit rooms
• The 500 has a lot of glare too.
• The Mighty Bright Flex light is nice, but it brings glare, makes the Reader just a tad top heavy, looks real stupid (my wife insists that I am reading a beetle ) and mine has a serious issue with flickering and brightness
• I have read about 90 books last year, give or take a few. None of them paper. So I use my Reader for about 3 hours each the day (way more on the weekends, or if my wife is working late)
• And I like to choose the next book as soon as I have finished - so I´d like to carry around a load of books and have a decent ui for selecting them.

On top of that: Why should I "upgrade" to a 505, if it doesn´t bring any benefit except better contrast? Well, sure I could add a memory card and but heaps of books on it (even as collections afaik), but it would still leave me with the cumbersome interface for selecting the next book. Also the USB 1.1 makes putting new books onto the 500 a bit of an effort. It is not something you should remember 5 minutes before you have to leave...

Anyway, to make a long story short:

It should be here sometime next week. I convinced myself by calculating how much I saved by owning the 500:

90 books per year at about 8 € (paperbacks) comes to 720 €. As I mostly read english books, which are even more expensive in Germany, I saved the money for 2 PRS700-units in one year. Reading e-books costs nothing, if you stick to the books on here and spice it up with a bit of Project Gutenberg. Even the 10 or so books I bought as ebooks don´t change the facts that much...

Now, I can hardly wait ;-)

Cheers

Chili