Sony 505 - New Owner, First Thoughts

[Renaldo]

Originally Posted by FizzyWater

Congratulations, Renaldo! Now you need to update your profile - you're not a "none yet" owner anymore.

Thanks, and nice catch! I've updated it!

Originally Posted by dordale

Regarding SD cards and draining batteries--I think that the type of SD card may make a difference.

I think it might also. I think what you do with it might also effect it. I've had about a half dozen devices that I've used and SD card in, none of them have ever used more power just because the card was present. However, even if it does drain the battery in the 505 for some odd reason, I think I can live with it. I've read 2 books on it so far, and have yet to see the power meter move. That's highly acceptable.

Originally Posted by kevin_boone

Even if you can put 2000 books into you reader, I doubt you'll be able to find anything you want. The navigation is neither particular clever nor particularly swift. It's just more hassle than it's worth. Unfortunately.

Maybe for you, and if that's the case then I respect your decision not to use any extra storage. However, I don't really see myself having any problems with it. With most electronic devices, including the 505, I've found that indexing and navigation are as clever as the user. I agree it's not particularly swift, but breaking things out into just 6 simple categories allows for enough seperation to browse through an entire category in under 30-40 seconds. To me, that is more than acceptable. I do wonder why you have one, as your view of it seems to be highly negative.

[sigma8]

Originally Posted by kevin_boone

Calibre has the ability to create collections, too. It does this automatically based on tags in the books metadata.

Thanks! I gave the meta data screen the most cursory of looks, and didn't see anything obviously, but now I know to look a bit harder.

But given that memory is cheap and ebooks are small, it is sad that support for large collections hasn't been properly thought through.

The lack of organization/navigation facilities is the only thing, in my view, that lets down an otherwise excellent device.

I would have to agree it doesn't seem well-suited to handling large collections. One thing that is really perplexing to me, is that when you view by author, all it does is sort by author. I was expecting a more ipod-like "by artist" where you would see a list of authors, and then you'd click down another level, showing just that author's books (in isolation). I don't have many books on mine yet, and I cliked the P Q R S alpha selection for the author, and I still got Kaiten Nukariya, Lewis Carroll, and Okakura Kakuzo...all ahead of Plato...and William Shakespeare is also on the same page...

Those are K, L, O and W authors showing up when I selected P Q R S. It's still all in order, and I definitely got all the P-S authors on that page, but it's not what I expected and it's visually noisy.

I can hit T U V, which reports "no book", and it still lists all my books. That's not "no book".

And there doesn't seem to be a fast way back to the alpha-index. Since the alpha-index is page 1 of the sort, if you had a lot of books and you're on page 10, you can't just hit "1" and go back to page one, because "1" would select whatever book is at slot one. Hitting menu to go back up a level , and then "3" to go back to the author just returns you to the last page you looked at, so there's really no easy way to get back to the index short of paging all the way back there.

Whoever made the suggestion about carrying around various SD cards...I'm starting to like that suggestion. I think it might be time to hunt down all my retired camera SD cards! they're all pretty small...less than 512 megs. Would be perfect for this sort of thing.