I received on friday a sony ebook reader. This devices is based on the E-Ink technology from eink, also known as “E-Paper” and lets you read your ebooks in a much more pleasant way. Actually I had a few gigs of those and reading them on a usual TFT screen was really a pain… and quite often when I order a book on Amazon it can take ages until it gets delivered.
After a couple of hours toying with the device, my thoughts is that the device itself is awesome… the touch of the metal brushed casing along with the soft high quality plastic skin is really enjoyable. The user interface is really cool as it memorizes where you stopped in your reading & lets you change font size easily. The device has an SD + Memorystick reader which is cool (I have no memorystyck but really a lot of SD Cards). There are a couple of drawbacks though : the original file format is called BBeB and is proprietary, no OSX software, I’m using parallels and finally the Sony Connect Store software really sucks and is a pale imitation of iTunes. Last but not least, you cannot view PDF A4 ebooks out of the box… the device will not split the pages and let you increase the font size enough to make it readable. The workaround I found is to convert to RTF before uploading, then it works like a charm.
Anyway I’m really enjoying it Oh and by the way it’s only available in the US… Got mine on ebay for about 150€ which is quite a decent price for such a g33k toy.

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