For years, I’ve pined for a device onto which I could load up a bunch of manuals¹, and just carry it along. I’ve been through the Adobe Acrobat for Palm; the rendered PDFs are virtually unnavigable because of the small size of the PDA screen.

I entertained an Asus Eee PC; a coworker brought his in, and while I’m impressed with the device overall, the screen size once again is too small for effective PDA display.

I could just load up all my manuals on my laptop, but there is a considerable overhead involved when all I want to do is check a manual.

I’ve sent numerous PDFs to FedEx/Kinko’s, and they’ve printed and bound them for me. That’s fine, but it’s impractical to carry around a bookshelf full of printed material. Also, the cost of printing, while not exorbitant, makes me picky about what items I commit to dead tree media.

Enter the Sony 500 ebook reader. I would never have laid out the $250+ purchase price for one of these on the off chance it would do the job. Recently, I got my American Express Rewards catalog, and darned if I didn’t have enough points to get a PRS 500 for free. Now, the whole cost structure has changed, and I got one. Did I mention for free?

Reviews of the PRS 500 abound, and there’s a new model, the 505, so I won’t give a review of the 500, except to say that I’m delighted with the sharpness of the pages. The device’s UI has been excoriated for having too many buttons; I have no problem with buttons, especially considering that I got it for free. I took it to work, and it got several oohs and ahhs. The lack of a backlight is not a detriment, considering the great battery life that obtains from not having one. Plus, this thing is a book. You read it under a light source, and it’s the closest thing to paper that you can get. I could definitely curl up with the Sony on a rainy day.

I doubtless handicapped the device’s overall utility, since I don’t/won’t run Windows. There are several freeware packages that enable you to copy files to the reader, using Mac OSX and/or Linux. I use the python-based libprs500, which is packaged for both Mac and Linux. File transfers to the Sony, either to its internal memory, or to the SD card, work well. As an added bonus, there’s a pdf2lrf command line utility that converts PDFs to the native Sony proprietary format, and works pretty well, at least for tech manuals. Reading PDFs natively on the device is a non-starter; the PDFs render, but are teeny-tiny, and barely readable. Converting them to the Sony proprietary format takes full advantage of the reader functionality, with noticeable, though generally minimal, degradation in the original layout. As far as I can tell, not using Windows means that I can’t visit the Sony e-book store and download overpriced, DRM’ed books that I don’t care about anyhow. I may have some problems updating firmware on the reader, but I’ll cross that bridge later.

So, I’m pleased with the Sony so far, so much so that if this one lays down or otherwise becomes a brick, that I’d probably buy a new one.

And lastly, one of the books that was preloaded on the device was George Orwell’s 1984. Not that it’s timely reading for these times or anything.

-k-
Picture posted with “click to embiggen.”

[stags]Geek,ebooks,Sony Reader,libprs500[/stags]
[tags]libprs500, sony ereader[/tags]