TimesToCome

We were wandering looking for holiday presents and came upon the Sony eBook readers at the local Sony store. We were all set to get one for everyone when I read the fine print that said ‘Windows required’. We ended up with only purchasing a couple of them.

Later a fellow twitterer told us about Calibre an open source program that allows you to transfer pdfs, ebooks and many other formats to the Sony reader’s preferred format (lrf). It also allows you to edit the book information, titles, authors etc. In addition you can tag your books to create collections on your Sony reader.

It does not handle drm’d material. Nor can you use the Sony ebook store from OSX. I guess Sony doesn’t want my money? No matter, my main interest in the reader was to be able to read technical manuals and scientific papers.

I had read on many forums that Sony readers do not handle pdfs well. This is not true. If a pdf is a true text document and not just scanned images of book pages it renders them beautifully in three different text sizes. If the pdf is just scanned images it is not readable. The only scanned pdfs I’ve found have been on pirate sites so this isn’t an issue for me.  All of my technical manuals and scientific papers render beautifully.

I downloaded an issue from SciAm but because they have columns in their pdfs the text gets jumbled and they are unreadable on your Sony Reader. O’Reilly makes several books available for pdf download. These are watermarked not DRM’d so you’ll have no trouble reading them on your reader.

Should you want to read something besides technical papers check out Planet eBook which has a great classic and science fiction section, Project Gutenberg which has thousands of free books you can download or Feedbooks. Tor is also giving away pdf sci-fi books, I think they plan to do one a week. Bookyards has lots of novels and textbooks. Yet another excellent source of books, already formatted for your Sony is Munseys. Munsey’s also sells CDs of their books on eBay, I just purchased a 12,000 book cd all preformatted for my Sony reader.

A site I just recently stumbled into is Scribd, they have everything from textbooks to novels, all are available for downloading as *.pdfs or *.txt either of which you can view on your reader or convert to *.lrf format.

The Sony book store is a disgrace, but Fictionwise has a great selection of books at prices that are reasonable for eBooks. They carry non-drm’d books in the Sony format as well as drm’d in pdf format which works just fine on your reader once you’ve authorized it.

On OSX you must install a virtual machine or borrow a friend’s Windows computer to do the Adobe authorization.  Download Adobe, download Digitial Editions, sign up for an account, plug in your Sony reader and authorize it.

Once authorized you can download drm’d books to your Mac and move them to your reader using Calibre or just drag and drop them on the reader drive.  When you purchase pdf’s that are drm’d you get a reciept for the book, not the book.  You open the reciept in your Adobe digital reader, you can do this on OSX.  It will create a pdf which you then load onto your reader.

So if you are looking for a portable reader for manuals, scientific papers, classics,  ebooks drm’d and not Sony PRS-505 is an excellent choice. While the over the air software and hardware doesn’t exist like on Amazon’s Kindle, it also isn’t back ordered for three months.

I like the Sony hardware much better than I do the Kindle. It feels sturdier and is nicer looking and a bit more compact. Also to read pdfs on Kindle you must email them to Kindle, this might not be practical with larger technical manuals.

My father has trouble reading anything but big print books now. So we gave him the higher end, touch screen Sony reader which has two additional larger font sizes and a backlight.

The built in memory handles hundreds of books, both of the readers allow you to add memory cards. A 8 gb sd card will store more books than you could ever read. I’m guessing I could fit at least 10,000 books on my 8 gb card.  The Sony reader has two card slots, each of which will read up to a 32gb card.