Be Excellent To Each Other

Sony PRS-505 'ebook reader' now down to £149.99 (RRP £229)

http://www.play.com/Electronics/Electro ... P36=ENCLSD

Anyone here got one / used one ? , for the gadgety type thing i'm tempted and i've seen on in a Waterstones near me and thought it was a dummy test unit until you press the buttons and the page moves on

Someone here in work has got one, and I've also had a go on a Kindle. The screen is absolutely lovely to read from, far, far better than anything else (and I've read a number novels from my PDAs over the years). You'd have to be fairly committed to ebooks to drop £150 on one but I've never seen anything else get even remotely as close to reading a printed page.

I really quite fancy one of those. I have seen one in store, had a browse, and the text and clarity are wonderful. I've never been able to find out if they display PDF files. if they did, I think I'd be more or less sold on one.

Where does everyone 'buy' their 'books' from? The iPhone is kind of ok for reading, but I don't have any ebooks.

From the play.com page.

yeah, yeah... Well, I wasn't going to go and read the product information page now, was I?

...Going to look up mac compatibility...

Sony fail.

Yip - a few reviews :

http://www.trustedreviews.com/mobile-de ... -Reader/p1

http://reviews.cnet.com/e-book-readers/ ... 72723.html

http://fwd.five.tv/videos/jon-tests-e-readers

I think you can read the books off of SD cards so I suspect it would be a simple matter of gleaning the undoubtedly stupid file structure that Sony uses and simply placing the books in the right folders on the card using a generic card reader. I do know some mac owners who use this book reader.

Yes, I did read that you can drag and drop the files, but any software updates will not be able to be loaded without the desktop software which is PC only (so no Linux or Mac OS). Also, PDF files are able to be stored and viewed, but you cannot zoom in on the PDFs, from what I have read.

One other thing that I think would just irritate me a bit too much is looking at the demonstration video, the screen 'flashes' black every time you turn the page, which I really do not like. I don't understand why they have made it do that I think that is something that they should look at in the next version.

It looks like, when you plug it in, it appears as a drive in OS X. I think that's enough? [citation].

Edit -- more on the eReader under OS X: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Reade ... _and_Linux

Depending on your definition of 'buy' then Fictionwise (http://www.fictionwise.com) is a good place to start.

Myp: get Stanza, which has access to all of Project Gutenberg.

I've got Stanza, but didn't realise that.

Does it have all the Police Academy Books?

They probably have to do that to clear the screen.

Plenty of torrents out there... Also, proper ebooks are reasonably cheap, especially if you regularly spend on proper books brand new. AND, there's Project Gutenberg for all of the classics now out of copyright.

Cheers, most helpful.

I'm not sure. I looked at a few places on the web and people keep mentioning it as a negative and comparing it to the kindle reader which does not do that, and unless the screens are very different in their technology... Anyway, who knows, it's just a bit annoying.

It reminded me of an etch-a-sketch when someone shakes it to clear

Stanza has built in connectivity with it's Online Catalogue function in the actual app linking to about a dozen different resources, some specialising in genre fiction, some specialising in free genre fiction and also to commercial entities selling recently published stuff.

Does it? Golly.

Yup. I haven't used any of the commercial sites it links to so I don't know how seamless an experience it is, but some of the free ones like Gutenberg are very quick - downloading whole novels in mere seconds over wifi and usually in less than a minute over Edge as well.

I have a PRS-505 and I loveitloveitloveitloveit. It's possibly the favourite of all the gadgets I own, as I read a lot.

Why have you never shown it to me?

Uh - dunno. It doesn't seem like a gadget, for some reason.

Can we split out book reader gubbins to a new thread? I wouldn't mind discussing it.

Well that killed the conversation - cheers.

:0)

I use http://www.booksonboard.com for quite a bit - they don't have the greatest range, but the prices are good as they're in dollars. For anyone who likes sci-fi, http://www.webscriptions.net (run by Baen/Tor) is brilliant for cheap books, and they tend to give away the first book in any given series for free.

Craster, so it is worth getting?

I have been tempted, but as I can get free books from the libary.. It will take a lot of tempting..

Depends. As a device, it's great. Usability, readability, battery life all brilliant. I now get books cheaper than I could before, don't have to worry about where to keep them, and can carry them around much more easily. But this matters a great deal to me, because I read a lot. For people who don't necessarily read a lot, I can't see it being a great addition to their life.

Oh I do read a lot, the wife moans at the size of my book collection...

Then it's brilliant. As long as you aren't someone who really likes nice copies of hardback books with lovely pictures in, go for it.

Thanks, I will have a look at the sites you recommended..

I'm interested in all this, as both an avid reader and a hopeful author. My friend Dave was espousing on the awesomeness of the Kindle the other day, and I'm still a little unsure about it until it drops down in price to remove the barrier to entry.

Are they still pricing things as 'hardback' and 'paperback'? Also, what's currently the average cost of a regular e-book? Do they do discounts for multiple purchases?

Annoyingly, they do do silly things like pricing at 'hardback' prices. Pricing tends to be pretty much RRP, but this is offset by the fact that as it's a download, you can buy directly from the US at US prices, meaning you typically save around 30%. Some sites do multibuy discounts and loyalty schemes.

There are no details yet on what a UK Kindle will have from a connectivity perspective. I would expect to see a single-carrier 3G offering, much as in the US, but I worry about what price they'll settle on for that.

If they can sell the device cheaply and subsidise it by providing a good iTunes style comprehensive delivery system and skimming off the publishers (who save money via not having to produce and ship books) then I'm in, and everyone wins.

Well the delivery system is a proprietary amazon one, that's a given. Publishers/resellers don't get the whole "Why would I pay the same for an eBook as a physical book, what with the lack of your costs and the lack of tangible product" issue, so that doesn't tend to happen. It's likely to happen even less given that the fact that you are buying from amazon means no competition. I don't think they'll sell it for cheap, either - the Kindle effectively bundles a lifetime 3G contract with no monthly charge to provide the download functionality, I think the carriers will insist on a substantial upfront charge for that.

Couldn't that be the best of both worlds, though? Buy a lovely hardback copy, but never have to worry about it getting damaged as you can download an ecopy.

This is what I'm seriously starting to think about doing with music. Buy a nice vinyl copy upon release, then downloading the mp3s.

My main issue is cost. I do love holding a book in my hands, but I think I'll be able to get over that eventually. I just don't want to be paying more than I do currently, or even the same amount for the e-books.

That said, if the additional profit margin went to the author, I'd happily pay the same price.

Oh of course - but that assumes that cost isn't an issue.

And that's where shopping from the US becomes useful. Note that if you get a Kindle when they release it over here, I guarantee you that the store will be locked to Amazon.co.uk for pricing, not Amazon.com.

Bundling the download free with the hardback would be a smart move. So they won't do that.

Why spend a million on that when you're never going to read it? That's just snobbery!

Some do. I know of one series (again, Baen - the only publisher that seems to like eBooks) that puts a CD in the back of the hardback with an eBook and audiobook of the erm...book.

What is stanza?

An iPhone ebook reader thingy.

An iPhone eReader app.

I like to think my reply was more for the layman - none of your technobabble.

What's an app? Is it short for apple?