Sony Reader

ExEmGe · Post by **ExEmGe** » July 31st, 2007, 11:46 am

Sorry folks - I could have sworn I posted this into 'Off Topic'

I've been given an unbirthday present - a Sony 'Reader' and it's absolutely super! Light, about the size of a small paperback,easy to use and I've got about 90 books on the SD chip and the internal memory. Battery life seems good, very good in fact. It will come in handy for Librivox - save me printing out chapters to read - I can't get on with reading from the monitor
It seems to have only two disadvantages: it encourages me to read too many books at once, I think I'm on five at the moment; and since I can load Gutenberg books on to it, my 'to read' pile has assumed the size of a virtual Eiffel Tower!
(Sadly, I have no financial interest in Sony.)

ChrisHughes · Post by **ChrisHughes** » July 31st, 2007, 12:22 pm

Wow ExEmGe - where can you get one of these - I have looked, and ebay seems to be the only place, in the UK.

Cori · Post by **Cori** » July 31st, 2007, 1:30 pm

I love mine ... was a present from a roaming friend.

The battery life is the subject of intense debate currently, since it uses about the same off as on.

The result of something very weird from Sony, since previous firmware did much better. And from an LV point of view, the MP3 player needed just a little more effort to be a really splendid way to listen to texts and read along. But I picked up a memory card on eBay and have stuffed the thing with books, audiobooks and some free classical music, and all in all, it's just marvellous. Reading outdoors in the sunshine! mmmm!

I'd recommend the MobileRead forums as an excellent place to get the gossip, find out how to recharge the thing so it shows on the battery indicator, speculate on updates, and pick up very well-formatted PD books (though, if you're conscientous about such things, they'll need some checking out, since some are Australia-PD, for example. Me, I think it's a tradeoff for some of the other concessions Sony forces me to make.

)

Chris, there was a thread there by someone willing to ship occasionally to the UK, and many of the UK owners there followed that route, though with varying experiences of Customs.

Planish · Post by **Planish** » August 1st, 2007, 1:12 am

So, how well does it display the hard line-wraps of the gutenberg text? Does it give you a lot of "orphan" words when you resize the font, like this?

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit,
sed diem nonummy
nibh euismod tincidunt ut lacreet dolore magna aliguam erat
volutpat.
Ut wisis enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tution
ullam corper
suscipit lobortis nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.
Duis te
feugi facilisi. Duis autem dolor in hendrerit in vulputate
velit esse
molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla
facilisis
at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit
praesent
luptatum zzril delenit au gue duis dolore te feugat nulla
facilisi.

ExEmGe · Post by **ExEmGe** » August 1st, 2007, 1:36 am

where can you get one of these - I have looked, and ebay seems to be the only place, in the UK.

Chris: So far as I am aware you can't. My Son (for it was he) asked a friend who goes to New York every week to pick a couple up. Sorry

So, how well does it display the hard line-wraps of the gutenberg text?

Planish: I don't suppose it does. Whenever I download something from Gutenberg I always reformat it anyway. Sort out the paragraphs, Times Roman font and paginate the chapters - It only takes five minutes.

Cori · Post by **Cori** » August 1st, 2007, 1:44 am

Planish ... what Andy said.

Reformatting their text is the only way to fly (but I do that as standard when downloading from them anyway, whether I'm reading, LibriVoxing or whatever.)

Also, the PDF-software is a bit eccentric on mine ... if I resize to be able to see the text nicely, it holds the setting for a few page turns, but then goes fuzzy as if in an attempt to get back to unreadable. And the moral of that story is ...

Andy: have you had the kid in a sweetshop effect yet, with regard to LV..? "I'll just pop this onto my reader, so I can read it with a view to LibriVoxing it sometime ... " The main memory of mine is crammed with books I'd love to record. (The less obviously PD stuff, and MP3s I keep on the memstick.)

I desperately need to become independently wealthy (and be able to hire an audio editor fulltime too.)

ExEmGe · Post by **ExEmGe** » August 1st, 2007, 11:27 am

Thanks Cori for that link - most useful. I wondered why it didn't seem to be charging -sets my mind at rest.
re Australia - I wondered where 1984 had come from.
& re the 'sweetshop' - You bet. I've already downloaded several including a treatise on railway block signalling which I doubt I'll ever read, even to myself!

Cori · Post by **Cori** » August 1st, 2007, 1:46 pm

Well, Andy, if you'd like to contribute Railway Blocks to the ol' Insomnia Collection, that would be pretty good!

Planish · Post by **Planish** » August 4th, 2007, 12:36 am

Cori wrote:Andy: have you had the kid in a sweetshop effect yet, with regard to LV..? "I'll just pop this onto my reader, so I can read it with a view to LibriVoxing it sometime ... " The main memory of mine is crammed with books I'd love to record.

That prompts me to ask the question: How quiet are the navigation controls? I find that when I read aloud from the computer, pressing the page down or arrow keys, or even just moving the scroll wheel on my mouse to advance the text makes an audible clicking on the recording, so I usually pause to advance and then edit it out later.

If it was like the iPod Nano thumbwheel scrolling, it would be really quiet.

magtutudlo · Post by **magtutudlo** » August 7th, 2007, 8:49 pm

I looked into those. I really like the look, but not the price. As I understand it, there is no search ability which comes in handy with dictionaries and such.

I also understand Amazon.com has one out, but I don't know the price or if it is any better.

Do you know if you can download a dictionairy and search it, or anything about the Amazon one?

Cori · Post by **Cori** » August 7th, 2007, 11:55 pm

The navigation controls are all buttons, Planish, so they do click slightly as you read. No louder than the turn of a page, but still audible. However, because the Reader shows you pages, rather than one single page ... you'd have to pause at the end of a page anyway, like reading from paper, to get the follow-on sentence right -- so I don't think I'll have any problem in recording from mine.

That's correct, no search, magtutudlo, and I know nothing about the Amazon.com one. You could download one, easily, but you could only navigate it in the same way as a paper book -- turning to the rough section of the book you wanted and then paging through after that. Would probably take about the same time as grabbing one off the shelf as you read -- not like online access to M-W.com.

magtutudlo · Post by **magtutudlo** » August 8th, 2007, 8:21 am

So you can turn, say, 100 pages at a time and then turn others more slowely? That would work for me, I think.

Cori · Post by **Cori** » August 8th, 2007, 8:31 am

Well, there's 10 buttons for percentages of the book overall, but same sort of thing ... 'x' is about 90% of the way through ... 't' would be mebbe 60 or 70%, etc. I wouldn't want to do it with a really big dictionary, but concise ones, or lengthy glossaries would work fine.

(There is speculation that those percentage buttons could be used for entering letters, mobile-phone-stylee, and thus have a good search ability ... but ... not in the immediate future.)

Edited to add: whirling across to Off Topic now.

Edited to add further: I upgraded mine to the very latest firmware at the weekend -- wheee ... functional battery charge indicator at last. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem as good as it was with MP3s ... I listened to an audiobook with it for about 3 hours on Sunday, and lost 3/4 charge in that time. I know it's not designed as an MP3 player, but still ...