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Sony Reader

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Promotional photo.

The Sony PRS-500 Reader is an e-book reader for the U.S. market. It uses an electronic paper display developed by E Ink Corporation, that has 166 dpi resolution, four levels of grayscale, is viewable in direct sunlight, requires no power to maintain the image, and is usable in portrait or landscape orientation. Due to its lack of backlighting, it may be difficult to read in low ambient light. The reader uses an iTunes Store-like interface to purchase books from Sony's Connect eBook store. It also can display Adobe PDFs, personal documents, blogs, RSS newsfeeds, JPEGs, and Sony's proprietary BBeB ("BroadBand eBook") format.

The Reader can play unencrypted MP3 and AAC audio files. Unlike its close cousin, the LIBRIé, the Sony Reader offers no way for the user to annotate a digital book due to lack of a keyboard.

The digital rights management rules of the Reader allow any purchased eBook to be read on up to six devices (at least one of those 6 must be a PC). Although you cannot share purchased eBooks on other people’s devices and accounts, you will have the opportunity to register five Readers to your account and share your books accordingly. At this time Sony has no plans to introduce time-expiring books in the U.S.

The Reader was announced in January 2006. By September 2006, it was available for order from the Sony online store. It competes with other Epaper devices— the Irex iLiad and the Jinke Hanlin eReader.

Since 1 November 2006, Readers have been on display and for sale at Borders bookstores throughout the US, according to posts at MobileRead.com. Borders had an exclusive contract for the Reader through the end of 2006. As of April 2007, Sony Reader is sold in the US by multiple merchants, including Fry's, Costco, Border's and Best Buy. The Sony Connect eBook store is only available to US residents. However, if you imported the Sony Reader yourself and have received the standard Sony credits, you will be able to use the credits for books at the Sony Connect eBook store, even if you are not a US resident.

The black-and-white (with 4 gray levels) screen is not covered under manufacturer's warranty. If the fragile e-Ink screen is damaged, the repair estimate is almost equal to the purchase price.

PRS-505

On October 2, 2007, Sony announced the PRS-505, an updated version of the Reader. The '505 keeps the 6" SVGA display of the original Reader, but uses an improved version of E Ink's imaging film with faster refresh time, brighter white state, and 8-level grayscale.

Other new product features include auto-synchronization to a folder on a host PC, support for the USB Mass Storage Device profile, and full USB charging capability (the PRS-500 could only be recharged via USB if the battery was not fully drained, and if the Sony Connect Reader software was installed on the host PC). Also adding books to "Collections" (a feature to organize and group book titles) is now possible on the storage card, unlike the PRS-500 model.

Specifications

  • Size: 6.9 x 4.9 x 0.5 in (17.5 x 12.4 x 1.3 cm)
  • Weight: 9 oz (250 g)
  • Display:
    • size: 6 in (15.5 cm) diagonal (approx 1/4 area of letter-sized page)
    • resolution: 166 dpi, four-level gray scale (8-level gray scale in the PRS-505)
    • portrait: 90.6 x 122.4 mm (3.57" x 4.82"), 600 x 800 pixels | effective 4.54 x 3.47 in (115.4 x 88.2 mm), 754 x 584 pixels
    • minimum font size: 6 pt legible, 7 pt recommended
  • Memory: 64 MB standard, Memory Stick (Pro Duo High Speed not supported. Normal memory sticks are only supported up to 4GB, despite Sony compatibility claims 1) or SD card expansion up to 2 GB (some non-SDHC 4GB cards may work)
  • Rechargeable lithium-ion battery, up to 7500 "page turns" per charge
  • PC interface: USB port

Formats supported

DRM-free Text: BBeB Book (LRF), PDF, TXT, RTF, DOC. Typefaces in PDF files formatted for 8.5 x 11 inch (216 x 280 mm) pages may be too small to read comfortably. Such files can be reformatted for the Reader screen size with Adobe Acrobat Professional, but not by Adobe Reader software. The Reader does not directly support Microsoft Word .DOC format. The 'CONNECT Reader' application uses Word to convert the .DOC files to RTF before sending them to the Reader.

DRM Text: BBeB Book (LRX); Titles from major publishers and most small publishers can ONLY be read in Sony's proprietary format (BBeB); For example, such copy-protected ebooks in Adobe format cannot be read on the Sony device as of 17 February 2007

DRM-free Audio: MP3 and AAC

Image: JPEG, GIF, PNG, and BMP (Loading an animated GIF will freeze the Reader)

RSS: Limited to 20 featured blogs such as Engadget and Wired, no ability to add others and no auto-update (as of December 1, 2006)

The Reader supports TXT and RTF documents with Latin character set only. Other character sets (such as Cyrillic, for example) are not displayed correctly. Sony customer support confirmed that units sold in US only work with Latin characters (as of March 2, 2007). (Unofficial fix allowing to properly show cyrillic characters is available in Russian [1].)

Operating system

The Reader currently does not officially support connection to the Apple Macintosh or Linux operating systems. However, users of alternate operating systems can write files to SD cards which can then be plugged into the Reader. The third-party tool Docudesk PRS Browser for OS X allows Macintosh users to easily manage content on the Sony Reader. Users can also use the free software library and utility libprs500 written by Kovid Goyal to communicate with the Reader and manage their digital library. This utility has both a command line and graphical interface, and is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

An examination of the operating manual reveals that the operating system for the Reader is MontaVista Linux Professional Edition.

See also

  • Sony LIBRIé: the precursor to the Reader, sold only in Japan.

Official

Forums

Third Party/Tools

Reviews/Press

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