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Posted on May 27th, 2009 by Stuart Turton
Living with an eBook reader
As PC Pro’s resident book fiend I’ve had the pleasure of reviewing nearly every eBook reader released on these shores. I popped my eBook cherry reading “Farewell, My Lovely” on the Sony PRS-505. This was followed by “Moby Dick” on the Cybook Gen 3, “The Jungle Book” on the BeBook and “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” on the Cool-er – which takes the award for most disturbing book I’ve ever read.
I know some people are sceptical about this technology, but while I love paperbacks, eBook readers perfectly suit my reading habits. Just to establish those habits, I read two-to-three books a week and probably buy six or seven every fortnight. About half of those books I’ll give away, lose, or destroy while the other half slowly take over whatever house I happen to be living in. The ability to stick 850 books on a device smaller than a single paperback means that when I finally do buy a house I won’t need to worry about hiring the Royal Navy to ship my entire library for me.
An unfortunate consequence of reviewing something is that you don’t spend a lot of time with it. We have deadlines, other commitments and looming production staff. I’ve decided to rectify that and put an eBook reader through the wringer. Accompanying me on this journey will be the Cool-er which I’ve recently finished reviewing. Basically, we’re going to best buddies for the next month. It’s going to be flung in my bag, dropped in my pocket and keeping me company on the bus. Wherever my paperback normally goes, the Cool-er will follow.
And believe me, we’re going to be spending a lot of time together, because the book I’ll be reading is War and Peace, all 560,000 words of it. I’ve enjoyed reading shorter books on eBook readers, but it’s time to see if that E Ink screen holds up to really extended sessions. I’ll be recording the ups and downs as I go along, but hopefully in a month’s time I’ll be able to report back whether an eBook reader really can replace a trusty paperback.
If there’s anything you particularly want to know about any of these models feel free to give me a yell.
Tags: Cool-er, eBook reader
Posted in: Newsdesk
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11 Responses to “ Living with an eBook reader ”
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May 28th, 2009 at 9:55 am
Great idea for an extended review. I’m conisdering an eBook reader for exactly the reasons you outline. If you get chance I’d be interested to see you compare the Cool-er to the other readers as well. Thanks.
May 28th, 2009 at 10:09 am
My concerns are largely about the price and availability of books to download. I expect to pay less for an e-book than I pay for the physical copy on Amazon.
The other burning question, is it any good in bed?
May 28th, 2009 at 12:02 pm
I’m interested in how easy it would be for people to uplaod their own material. Aside from the usual work documentation that needs reading, I’ve got a friend who is a budding author and he normally gives me samples of his work in digital format (Word docs, text, etc). How easy is it to upload such stuff and how does it handle normal MS Word formatting – page breaks, true type fonts, etc? Also – is it any good with images embedded in the documents?
May 28th, 2009 at 12:08 pm
@ Dave.
Uploading your own material is the same process as uploading a book. You can just drag and drop it onto the device. The Sony PRS-505 and BeBook handle the doc format perfectly, and display pictures without any problems. I actually used them to read over my own reviews – a much nicer experience than reading them off my monitor.
Bizarrely, the PRS-505 struggles with PDFs. It seems to screw up the formatting arbitrarily. Hope that helps.
May 28th, 2009 at 12:09 pm
If you’re running eReader comparisons, what about Stanza on the iPhone or iPod touch? Powerful, free, user-friendly software on a device that does one or two other useful things as well…
May 28th, 2009 at 12:12 pm
Hey Noghar, I find reading long texts off LCD displays to be a fairly painful process. That’s the beauty of the E Ink displays on eBook readers – they replicate the experience of reading from paper. I agree though, it’s definitely worth looking at apps like Stanza. I’ll ask one of our iPhone owners if they fancy knocking up a blog post about it.
May 28th, 2009 at 12:12 pm
@Stuart,
Thanks for the info… now if only I can get my mate to send me some updated material!
May 28th, 2009 at 12:13 pm
I’m sure he’ll do it any year now!
May 29th, 2009 at 12:51 pm
good idea. I have an ebook reader from SONY. It has some drawbacks such as slow software (not as bad as other ebooks it seems from other reviews) and if I put in a 1GB memory stick it will simply freeze.Also the software it comes with takes a while to get used to.
But I carry it with me anywhere I go and I really love it. I have all my IT books on it as well as books for my university course and other material I like to read. The internal 200 MB memory is enough but I cant wait to read your blog about the Cool-er
August 12th, 2009 at 5:34 pm
[...] in May I wrote a blog post outlining my plans to live with an eBook reader for a month as I ploughed through a digital copy of War and Peace. My aim, as I wrote at the time, was to put [...]
November 13th, 2010 at 5:18 am
We’re on tenterhooks here in Singapore – the iPad is supposed to be released in Singapore sometime in July, supported by data plans from all three local telcos. Still, iOS4 is available (except for me, because my archaic 1st gen Touch isn’t supported) and iBooks is available in the local App Store – it’s number two on the free apes list. I can’t test it out for myself, since you need iOS4 to use it, but it doesn’t matter. It looks like I can’t buy books for it anyway.