I just last night got back from a trip back to San Diego to celebrate my grandson’s first birthday and a little early Christmas with my daughter and her husband (that JUST MIGHT have involved some Super Mario Galaxy!)
It was also a shakedown for the Sony Reader. I didn’t bring any books, and I didn’t even bring the USB cord that lets it charge while connected to a computer. So, six books, five days, one charge. How did it do?
Our plane was delayed in Hartford two hours for mechanical troubles. So we missed the connecting flight in Detroit, and had to be shuttled to San Francisco and then on another airline entirely to San Diego. Can we assume we also got pulled aside for special secondary screening? We can indeed. We were supposed to arrive in San Diego at 11:30 AM. Instead, we got there around 6 PM.
I read all of Charles Stross’ “Halting State”, a book that would have benefited by being more about just one thing than a mish-mash of a Scottish police procedural, future MMO development and best accounting practices…
I only had a few hours to read per night after that, so I started my Philip K. Dick fun with “Galactic Pot Healer”, a book which I’ve apparently *started* to read several times, but always end up recognizing the beginning and assuming I’d read it already. Silly title aside, this book pits free will against fate. If following the will of fate would be demonstrably better for you than doing what you feel (perhaps wrongly) is best, should you be given the freedom to fail?
Finished that, got through almost all of “Time Out of Joint”, a book where a man obsessed with a newspaper contest slowly realizes that everything in the entire world revolves around him. (Dick would take the opposite tack in “Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said”, where a super-famous celebrity wakes up to find nobody has the slightest idea who he is). TOoJ is an old favorite and one of Dick’s most famous books.
The Reader lost its charge right near the end of “Time Out of Joint”, leaving me with nothing but Pokemon Diamond for the remainder of the flight back to Hartford. Couldn’t make it through the Elite Four… almost…
I’d read those books in the largest type and, thus, the largest number of page flips — the Reader only takes power when flipping pages. I guess I got about 6500 page flips or so out of it.
The good points: One small device easily held a dozen books. Easy to read in almost any light. The flash when the page flips isn’t any more jarring than turning the page of a real book. And the print is as large as you need it to be. Looks great and is easily read in almost any light.
The bad points: You can’t read a book during takeoffs and landings, or in the dark. Eventually the thing will run out of power. Older books can be impossible to find for it. Some books (such as those from Project Gutenberg) come in as text only, which can look unpleasant (I wrote a Python filter to reformat text books into properly formatted HTML, which the freeware utility LibPRS500 can turn into proper Reader books — but that’s probably more than most people want to do. Also, there’s a big difference between losing an eight dollar book and a three hundred dollar reader.
The thing I wanted most from the Reader — a way to make reading easy and enjoyable for someone with bad eyes — I got, and a week in, I’m still extremely happy with it. It has very few bells and whistles, things the competing Amazon Kindle has in spades. It might well be cheaper to use an old Palm PDA or an iPhone to do the same thing, though they won’t last as long on a charge (but then, perhaps you recharge every night and this isn’t an issue). I like the size of the Reader’s screen and the crispiness of the text 🙂 and since I didn’t have one of those big-screen Palm PDAs, nor an iPhone (neither of them has such a large screen anyway), going with the Reader was an easy decision.
2 thoughts on “Back from California: How did the Reader do?”
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Even though there’s a US only restriction on the Sony ebook site, I’m still very tempted by the reader. Not least because there’s a very pleasant dollar/sterling exchange rate atm that makes importing one look quite attractive.
I had the same idea about writing a filter to plonk Gutenberg texts into HTML. Did something similar years ago to get books for my organiser.
Sounds as if it does exactly what it’s meant to do, which is all really want it to do. Yeah, a light and maybe a couple of other features would be nice BUT I’m more than happy to forego those for reliability.
awesome Sony Reader thing