My Sony Reader Diary: One Week (And A Bit) On

Well, I have been living with the Reader for just over a week now.  That initial rush of new gadget excitement is wearing off and the machine is finding its way into my reading routine.  I cannot say as yet where it will end up in the armchair hierarchy but I am definitely beyond first impressions now.

The Reader has been in my bag when I have travelled to and from work, it has been read on trains, in the office, in the garden in bright sunlight, at night by lamplight and more or less every other situation in which I would use a book.  You know, a proper one, made of paper.  The Reader bears up well.  It remains fun to use and I am getting plenty of reading done on it, which is the point after all.

I have enjoyed perusing the experiences of other bloggers who were sent a free Reader.  Dovegreyreader has one but has yet to announce the votes of the Devonshire jury.  Mark Thwaite over at ReadySteadyBook has another but only offers qualified praise.  His views on the future of the technology strike me as sensible and highly likely.  A couple of other bloggers I know have got one but no sign of their opinions at present.

I've also nosed around some other reviews in the press and the technology blogs.  Broadly speaking most people have enjoyed using it but often have a couple of gripes. Some of the complaints will depend on personal taste.  More than one person has raised the issue of screen glare or reflection under bright lights.  I haven't come across that problem and have used it in a variety of situations.  When light does fall across it the text remains perfectly legible to me.

Others have mentioned the annoyance of authors being listed and organised by first name.  If any of them own an iPod then they will have the same problem there so it didn't come as a huge surprise to me when confronted with it.  I'd prefer to be able to browse by surname but it doesn't take long to get used to.

But enough with the defence.  The Reader is not perfect and does have problems.  How much these bother you will depend on many factors.  They certainly haven't stopped me from using it, but it would be great if they could be fixed for future versions.

First up is the menu.  It is a bit clunky and not how most users would like to access their books.  Basic functionality is not disimilar to an iPod - keep hitting the MENU button to go back a step - but the layout and navigation through the library is not ideal.  Once you get your head round the whole first names thing it becomes a little easier but it still doesn't feel right.  There is an option to arrange your books into separate collections which I have yet to explore but I am not a big fan of the menus so far.

And then we have the software.  It is OK but has some odd quirks.  On iTunes I keep my entire library on a hard drive and sync it with my various players as and when.  Any changes or tweaks I make are made to the files on the drive.  The players then look after themselves.  I initially adopted the same approach with the Reader, sticking all the free classics and anything else I had into the eBook Library software.  But then, every time I connected the device it attempted to add all of the books again resulting in duplication and quickly running out of room.  The only solution I could come up with was to hold nothing in the library itself and just click and drag anything I wanted from its original location.  Everything works fine now but it bugged me for a while.

Oh, and then the scary 'have I broken it?' moment.  I used the power down option from one of the screen menus as that apparently saves the most battery power.  The Reader duly powered down.  So far down that I couldn't get the bugger back on again.  Hours later and no combination of buttons, leads or connections would work.  It was in a coma.  Eventually I resorted to the pin in the back reset option and it came back on again, thankfully with its contents intact.  But it did put the wind up me while it was sitting there unresponsive.

Although, to be honest, I have probably experienced similar glitches with much of the technology I have adopted in recent years.  New gadgets take some getting used to and not all of their features are to your liking.

So would I fork out £200 for a Reader based on the reading experience it offers and the functionality of the machine?

Er, no, not for those reasons.  But that's not all there is to it.  I have more to say in the coming days but that is plenty for you to be getting on with for now.

Comments

[Ben]

I'm using Stanza on the iPhone - it's free and fantastic. The only limitation is that you can't read books with DRM. But I'm having lots of fun reading Buchan, Orwell and lots of unusual volumes of Victorian satire.

[Scott Pack]

Interesting Ben, thanks for that. I think the Reader is pretty much the smallest screen I would consider comfortable reading on for any length of time but will see what things look like on a iPhone next time I see one.

[Rob]

I tend not to use the Sony software. I use something called Calibre (http://calibre.kovidgoyal.net/) partly because it works on the Mac. It gets updated a lot so it's getting better the whole time. It can automatically fill in the 'Author Sort' info for each book which is different from the 'Author Name' info. So for a book where the author name is 'Cory Doctorow', the sort field can be 'Doctorow, Cory'. Which means books appear in surname order. Calibre will also do some other handy things like fetch news from various sites and find cover pictures, copying them over to the reader for you.

Personally, I'd put a page turn button somewhere more convenient as well as overhauling the software (both on the device and on your computer) but overall I like the thing. More views here (http://www.snowbooks.com/weblog/2008/09/scott_free.html) if you're interested.

[Rob]

Hmm. Typepad has handily turned the URLs I included into proper links. But it's made my closing brackets part of the URL so they don't work. Snip off that closing bracket if you want to follow the links.

[John Self]

Interesting to read your ongoing thoughts, Scott.

Like Rob I have been using Calibre for mine, as I'm on a Mac, and have found it extremely easy to use. I didn't know you could do that with the surnames either, though as you point out Scott (and as it just occurred to me too today), iTunes does the same thing.

I *have* noticed the light glare, when I'm reading it by lying it on my desk at work. Bit of a pain. And I remain thoroughly irritated that there is no way of marking a passage rather than a whole page. It occurred to me that this could be easily done - there are ten buttons going down the side of the screen, and they could make it so that pressing and holding one of those buttons highlights the text alongside. However I realise this is not something most people will be bothered about.

I have also discovered some plus points over boring old 20th-century style paper books. You can read it with one hand (which I never do as I'm always worried about breaking spines), or indeed no-handed, as it won't close over on you. You can also read it while eating without fear of the Reader getting greasy or grubby - because you can wipe it clean if it does. Eat that, Penguin so-called 'Modern' Classics!

I have to say that one of my big bugbears may have been just in the particular book I had preloaded by the lovely Huw: Fateless by Imre Kertész. It has the oddest pagination I've seen. A 'page' in the book actually takes up 1.5 screens, so when you turn from page 8, you're on 'page 8-9' and then page 9-10, and then page 10. This might sound trifling but it has the most extraordinary effect on my perception of how long the book is: for a 180 page book, I'm 'turning the page' 270 times. It takes me 15 pages to read 10 pages, if you see what I mean. (That's on small size typeface; if it was medium or large, it would be 2, 3, or 4 'pages' per page.) As an inveterate quantity-surveyor when I read, this has driven me nuts. Also in Fateless, some phrases are in untranslated German and have a superscript number to take you to a footnote with the translation. However the footnote doesn't appear at the bottom of the screen, or even at the bottom of the 'page', but at some apparently random point in the subsequent text. The worst example was when I saw a footnote number and eventually got to the footnote seven page-turns later. This distracted me from the book itself - at least that's my excuse, because I thought it kind of dull. (which may in turn have affected my view of the Reader too.)

Anyway, I just finished reading my chosen book on it tonight, so I will be posting on it sometime next week. Which will probably be a slightly expanded version of this comment. Thanks for letting me use your blog as a sandbox!

[friend of rachel worth]

I think what is more interesting is that you cantnow get one for love or money (or as a freebie if youre reviewing it!)
This is either because
a) sony have seriously underestimated the number that Waterstone's would sell
b) thye are using the same technique as the gmaes consosles - ie create a must have momentum of lots of press , followed by scarce supply , followed by lots of press about scarce supply followed by sustainable demand (and those empty bays in waterstones are doing a great job for sony at the moment)

[Ben]

I was surprised that the iPhone screen was so comfortable to read from. The good thing about Stanza is the fact you can choose the font, font size, font colour, background colour, margins, line spacing etc until you hit on something that works for you. And there's next to no effort in page turning. I read the whole of 1984 (for at least the tenth time in my life), but this time I saw it in light grey text on a black background. I enjoyed every syllable as much as I have done when reading it in hardback or paperback.

[Cara]

I'd like to know where to find a decent selection of ebooks to download from.............'don't seem to be having much luck so far. Any clues?

[Simon Thomas]

I've been playing around with mine too (isn't Huw nice?) and liked it much more than I thought I would. However, the book in front of me is still a tatty old Penguin...