The Lockwood Blog

It’s been a little over a month since I first purchased an eBook Reader and I wanted to share my thoughts about these nifty little devices. I had a chance to use Sony’s PRS-600 and their PRS-300, which I ended up sticking with. The International Edition of the Kindle is now available, and if I’d had the time and money I’d definitely have tried one of these out as well. Here’s a closeup of the PRS-300, hit the read more link to read the rest of my thoughts:

First of all, I tend to read a lot of books, but I don’t necessarily think this is a prerequisite for owning an eBook. If you compare the price of best selling eBooks with the price of physical copies, you can justify the cost of an eBook reader with as little as 25 books, a conservative reader’s yearly quota. After that, any further purchases are savings that stay in your pocket.

However, I think the eBook Reader excels at a different market than new releases and best sellers: the classic book market. With website like Project Gutenberg and Feedbooks, getting a classic novel that’s properly formatted for your device is as easy as downloading a file and transferring it to your device. Of course, there will be naysayers that say the best part of reading a book is flipping through it, smelling it’s old pages, and keeping it on the shelf. Let’s be serious here, if you want one of these classics, and your serious about collecting them, then you aren’t going to settle for less than a first edition. If you aren’t going to settle for less than a first edition, then you aren’t going to spend less than the cost of an eBook Reader on the book. If you want to read the book, then an eBook reader fits the bill. You won’t worry about dog-earing pages, cracking spines, or getting hot sauce on it. (You want to be careful with an eBook, in the way your careful with any electronic device, but a little hot sauce wipes off no problem).

Next come the naysayers that don’t think eBooks look as good as paper. They’re getting there, and while I can’t say much about the PRS-600, whose screen is nigh unreadable in low light or specular lighting due to the high reflectivity of it’s touch screen layer, the PRS-300 is a good competitor to a standard paperback. In fact, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the PRS-300′s screen is better than a standard paperback for 2 reasons: one, it renders fonts flawlessly, unlike some prints that smudge or otherwise mar the ink on the page; two, it has a brilliant white background in natural light that rivals the contrast of a typical paperback, more so than aged and yellowed pages of older paperbacks. On top of those two reasons, the viewing angle is only limited by how oblique of an angle you are willing to read by. Here’s a quick shot of the screen (exert from Walden by Henry David Thoreau):

The benefits of the PRS-300 over regular books are it’s size, portability and manageability. It’s about the same width and height of a typical paperback, and about a third as thin. The PRS-600 and Kindle are both a bit larger in width and height, but still on the order of a typical hardcover. So yes, it’s smaller than a book, so it can go anywhere a book can go. It’s also denser, the PRS-300 can hold about 350 standard books. That’s not to say that you’ll be reading them all simultaneously, but if you fill the reader up at the get go, you’ve got 350 books to read before you have to do anything but charge it (don’t worry about charging it though, the battery lasts about 2 weeks of use, or about 4000 pages, in my experience). What do I mean by manageability? I mean that you don’t have to hold an eBook open to keep your page, you don’t have to use two hands to change pages…etc. I found this to be incredibly useful while eating, since I can use my hands for regular food activities, and touch the reader only to change the page. It’s also much easier to remain in a comfortable position while lying down, since you don’t have to alternate between the left and right pages of a book.

Before you go out and buy your own eBook Reader though, there are some points to consider. Although the software is getting more user friendly, Sony’s eBook Library and Adobe’s Digital Editions software are a major pain in the ass. I’ve personally switched to the open-source Calibre to manage my library and synchronize my books with my PRS-300. Although it’s simple to use, if you aren’t a tinkerer and you don’t like frustrating moments with finicky software, I would nudge you towards the Kindle, since it has wireless connectivity and a built in bookstore (it also can access Wikipedia for free).

I’ve currently read over 1000 pages on the PRS-300 and there’s no slowing me down. I’ll be burning through books on this thing until one of us kicks the bucket. As always, if there are any questions, I will be happy to answer them in the comments below.