Comments on: Living with an eBook reader

By: Obliterating an eBook reader in one easy holiday | PC Pro blog

Obliterating an eBook reader in one easy holiday | PC Pro blog — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 17:34:14 +0000

[...] 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 [...]

By: Daniela Ortu

Daniela Ortu — Fri, 29 May 2009 12:51:04 +0000

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

By: Stuart Turton

Stuart Turton — Thu, 28 May 2009 12:13:30 +0000

I’m sure he’ll do it any year now!

By: Dave

Dave — Thu, 28 May 2009 12:12:58 +0000

@Stuart,

Thanks for the info… now if only I can get my mate to send me some updated material!

By: Stuart Turton

Stuart Turton — Thu, 28 May 2009 12:12:16 +0000

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.

By: Noghar

Noghar — Thu, 28 May 2009 12:09:11 +0000

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…

By: Stuart Turton

Stuart Turton — Thu, 28 May 2009 12:08:43 +0000

@ 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.

By: Dave

Dave — Thu, 28 May 2009 12:02:21 +0000

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?

By: Jen

Jen — Thu, 28 May 2009 10:09:40 +0000

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?

By: James Douglas

James Douglas — Thu, 28 May 2009 09:55:23 +0000

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.