RicDay on Publishing

I have had my Sony reader for nearly two years and have read about 100 ebooks on it in that time. My iPad is a more recent acquisition (April this year) and I have read about twenty books on it. I prefer the iPad and will explain why.

Sony Strengths

Like all e-ink based readers, the Sony battery lasts and lasts. Even with heavy reading, it only needed charging about once per week. The iPad battery also lasts a long time, but I typically find myself recharging once a day (mostly because I also use the iPad for tasks other than reading books, and some of those consume more of the battery).

Reading outdoors on the Sony is easier than it is on the iPad, which has a reflective screen. Outdoors use is not impossible with the iPad; it just means fiddly positioning to avoid reflections.

The Sony is about one-half the weight of the iPad, which makes long reading sessions feel a bit less like exercise.

iPad Strengths

Page turns are instant and not noticeable. On the Sony (and other e-ink devices I have tried), page turns are very noticeable, causing a slight flash of the screen and a delay before the next page renders — the delay is smaller on newer e-ink readers, but it is there and it is irritating.

There are numerous reader applications for the iPad. With the Sony, you have Sony’s software and few alternatives. This allows me access to a wider choice of book suppliers for the iPad. I have tested a variety of iPad apps and am using three regularly: iBooks from Apple is my favourite, with a display I find easy to set for contrast and brightness, and a built-in dictionary (a major failing for Sony is the lack of a dictionary). I also use the Kobo and Amazon reader applications; the former because shopping on Kobo’s site is a far better experience than shopping on Sony’s site; the latter because there are times when Amazon is the only place I can find a particular book.

Sony Instability

Using Sony’s store with the Sony reader has been a fraught experience for me. Software upgrades twice wiped out my library and emptied the Reader of all books, forcing me to recover the books from my system backup archives. My notes, highlights, and bookmarls were lost each time.

Crashes while trying to move my books from Sony’s desktop repository to the Reader happen regularly, and the desktop app has a nasty habit of failing to fully boot, but instead getting stuck in limbo in a way that requires the use of the Windows system manager to shut down the rogue process.

My “work” computer here at home is a quad-core, Windows 7-64 system with 8GB of RAM, 1.8TB of local HDD storage, and a 100 Mbps connection to the Internet. I tried switching everything Sony to an older, 32-bit Windows XP system, but had the same dreadful stability problems.

Using the iBooks store is simple: tap the button on the iBooks bookshelf and you connect to the store where you can shop using your iTunes account and the book is added to your bookshelf almost instantly.

Conclusion

The Sony has great (hardware) build quality, but lacks shopping convenience and is badly served by miserable software (I suspect that Adobe’s horrible Digital Editions carries most of the blame for the nasty experiences I have had trying to buy books from Sony, but that does not excuse Sony from using an old version of ADE and depending so heavily on it).

Even if the Sony had WiFi (which is does not), I would inevitably have stopped using it. Yes, the iPad is larger and heavier, but the iPad is a device which I can often use in place of my laptop.

The iPad is a terrific device for consuming content: websites, RSS feeds, email, YouTube all work extremely well on it. I am not a fan of the touchscreen keyboard for anything longer than a sentence or two, but I recently bought an Apple bluetooth keyboard and that has transformed the iPad into a device upon which I can get a lot of writing done.

After many years of business travel around the world, I have become very sensitive to the weight of what I pack. I love my gadgets and have more than I probably should, but when I travel I want a lightweight, “Swiss Army Knife" device with long battery life — and that without question is the iPad.