Sony Reader & my Mac

There are a lot of books I like re-reading but would prefer not take up room on my shelf any longer (Tom Clancy, Grisham, Nelson DeMille, & Jonathan Kellerman are but a few). So the idea of a “Book iPod” that allowed me to carry numerous books around in a slim package was amazingly appealing. I tried this back in the day with Palm Pilots and reading for long stretches of time on an LCD/TFT screen had a noticeabe strain on my eyes.

Enter the development of “Electronic Paper” or E-Ink technology. Using a pretty simple premise, they offer a STATIC page viewing experience (no flickering) that mimics the way actual printed material reflects light to the human eye. It’s difficult to describe without actually seeing it yourself, but suffice to say, I think it’s revolutionary. It doesn’t hurt that E-ink only requires power when “switching pages” making for muuuuuuuch longer battery times compared to the alternatives.

And so we have the Sony eReader, loaded with a 6-inch E Ink screen and 64MB of internal memory. While this sounds miniscule compared to iPods, most of my eBooks are less than 1MB in size…allowing me to currently carry a total of 53 books around with lots of space to spare.

And it’s thinner than any paperback on my shelf…a svelte half an inch to be exact. Needless to say, it weighs next to nothing. Did I mention I’ve got 53 books inside?

The internal rechargeable battery’s life is measured in “Page Turns” by Sony, who claim you can expect 7500 a charge. In practical useage, I’ve found myself charging every 1 1/2 – 2 weeks. That’s right I said weeks…and I read for hours most days.

There are some caveats of course. To start, the Sony Connect software only runs on Windows. I use Parallels so I can use the Collections feature to organize my books and also add DRM books purchased from Sony’s Connect store.

But you can manually add and remove material using a Mac with this sweet little piece of freeware, (finally) making it a cross-platform device…albeit with obviously limited Mac functionality.

But it all comes back to the material for me. The Reader has an MP3 player I don’t use, a picture viewer, and something to do with RSS feeds, but I just read my books and enjoy rarely having to worry about charging it. To say this is a dream while traveling is a severe understatement…imagine having 50 books in your carry-on! And no power adapter required.

It can read the widely-used PDF file type (in addition to most standard ebook formats), but most owners like the RTF option and I agree that it’s best received on the Reader’s screen.

And that’s it! It’s easy to forget that Sony used to dominate high-end design in the electronics field before Apple started beating ass in the late-nineties. The Reader is solid evidence that they can still turn out a beautiful & revolutionary product…however imperfect some details may be.