RicDay on Publishing

After four months of near-daily use, I still love the Sony PRS-700 as a device for reading e-books. However, the problems of the device have become more obvious, and in some cases, more annoying. I do not plan a feature-by-feature review; there are already plenty of those on the web. Instead, I will focus on the things I think make the device much less than it could be.

Getting used to reading on the device took far less time than I expected — about 48 hours — and learning how to bookmark pages and make notes without referring to the manual took perhaps another 48 hours.

What I Don’t Use

The backlight (it actually lights from the long sides of the screen) chews up the battery pretty quickly and is not terribly useful, so I no longer use it.

Using the device as a music player (you can use earphones to listen while you read) also hammers the battery. The music-playing functionality is pretty basic anyway, so I have switched back to my iPod for music.

The touchscreen for turning pages is bass-ackwards: you swipe from left to right to go to the next page. That probably made sense to the engineer who designed it, but it is the opposite of what one does to turn the pages of a paper book. Evidently the engineers at Sony don’t read books or do real-world usability testing. Neelan Choksi and the developers at Lexcycle have it right with their Stanza reader on the iPhone/iPod Touch. I rarely use the Sony touchscreen.

The leatherette binder/holder for the PRS-700 has the feel of something made cheaply in a low labor cost country. When I am using the reader, I hold it in my left hand with my thumb in a position to click the page turn buttons. The bottom edge of the binder is rough and decidedly uncomfortable. A small gripe, perhaps, but I think justified when the product has a retail price of more than $400.

The Big Problems

The obvious big problem is the lack of any form of wireless connectivity. I don’t need a Kindle-like, free wireless service. Like many consumers today, I have wifi in my home and office, and enough hotspots around the city that finding an access point is rarely an issue. If Apple can build excellent wifi into the iPod Touch (giving me quick and easy access to the app store from anywhere), I think the lack of wifi on the 700 is a major mistake.

Less obvious, but endlessly annoying, is the lack of a dictionary. There is no dictionary as a native application, and none available to purchase on the Sony store site. At the 2009 Booknet Canada Techforum 10 days ago, an executive from Sony Canada said there is a way to install a dictionary (he has one on his PRS-700) and promised a follow-up email with the details. That was the last thing I heard from him.

Also highly annoying is the Sony web store software. More than 90 percent of the time, when I have the reader connected to my computer, the software tells me it cannot access the store because I am not connected to the Internet. Problem is, I am connected! I have uninstalled and reinstalled the software a number of times, with no change in its behavior. I do not have this problem connecting with the Apple store using either of my two iPods, nor do I have this problem connecting my Blackberry via the Blackberry Desktop Manager software. Either the Sony software which interfaces to their web store is flaky, or the DRM schemas used by the books I have purchased are causing the problem.

I’ve checked my firewall to make sure it is not the culprit (it isn’t). My computer (quad-core with 4GB very fast RAM running XP Pro) is not the problem either. If other software was giving similar problems, I would worry; as things stand, only the Sony software fails, persistently. So I have given up buying books from the Sony store. If they want to make it this hard to shop there, I guess they don’t want my business.

The final problem I have found is DRM-related. A while back, when the Sony store briefly worked, I bought a copy of Outliers (repetitive and could have been edited shorter, but an interesting read). I copied it to the SD card (Sony HG Duo) I use with the PRS-700. The Sony software promptly went nuts (technical term) and began spewing synchronization errors. It seems the DRM software did not like the idea that a copy of the book resides on my computer, a second copy is on the PRS-700 (placed there automatically by the Sony software), and another copy is on the SD card. The only solution has been to remove the SD card from the Reader. This contradicts the manual’s claim that you can place e-books on an SD card. I guess you can only do that if they are not using e-books using whichever horrible DRM system Reed Elsevier/Little Brown embedded in Outliers.

Conclusions

Despite the problems described above, I thoroughly enjoy reading books on the PRS-700 and do not regret having purchased it. I applaud the fact that Sony has opened up the device to allow multiple formats, instead of locking it down to a proprietary, DRM-laden system like the Kindle.

I do not think the PRS-700 is anywhere near what it could be, however, and most of that is because of the awful interface software. If you have used Stanza or another of the e-book readers on the iPhone or iPod Touch, and experienced the quick and seamless connectivity to the Apple store, you will know just how far behind the Sony product line is.

These problems may not hurt Sony too badly while e-ink-based readers remain in relatively short supply at prices well above the mass market, and geeky reviewers sing the praises of all new e-book reading devices. Once the market matures a bit, Sony will not do well unless they fix their current problems.