I managed to get my hands on a Sony Reader yesterday as I’ve been itching to get one for awhile now. The digital ink technology is very intriguing and I wanted to see and use it for myself. First off, the price tag of $350 is a bit steep to make it a generally accepted consumer gadget, but I’m a technology person so I added it to my collection.
When I first started it up, it had a nice selection of excerpts of books as well as some classics like George Orwell’s 1984 (which I’ve never read). Since I knew out of the box, it wouldn’t work with a Mac, I hooked it up to my Mac to see if the reader would mount as a USB mass storage device. Unfortunately it didn’t. Why Sony did this, I have no idea as the PSP mounts as a UBS mass storage device. So, Mac users are stuck using SD cards or MemorySticks which is fine, however, you can’t remove the pre-installed books without Windows. I fired up Parallels and was pleasantly surprised to see the Sony Connect software work fine on it and link up to the Reader over USB. Like most Sony user interfaces I’ve seen in the last decade, the Sony Connect software is just awful. While it tries to mimic iTunes, it fails miserably. You can only drag and drop books on certain places (you can drop a book onto the reader, but not the Books category on the reader), has annoying alert dialogs confirming deletes that take up the entire screen, and has no way to “eject” the Reader even with the warning on the Reader’s display not to disconnect.
So if we ignore the crappy Windows software, how does the Reader do? Well, the books that ship with it are great as well as some RTF files that I transferred to it. The display is amazing and these books work quite well with page turning that is quite speedy. However, one of the reasons I got this was to read technical info that usually comes in PDFs. The Reader’s PDF viewing has some issues. First off, it is dreadfully slow. It can take 10+ seconds to turn a page. Second off, it reduces the page without being able to zoom/scroll. So, after cropping some PDFs (Preview lets you crop PDFs), I was able to read the 8.5×11″ PDFs on the display, but it was still slow (I had to rotate the display and then I could view the PDFs in 2 halves). Not content to accept this fate, I started playing with some tools and found the free/open-source HTMLDOC which converts web pages into PDFs. Since the initial documentation I wanted to read is also in HTML (however it is in multiple pages), I gave HTMLDOC a whirl using some settings others have posted. Using the following settings:
htmldoc --webpage -f book.pdf --textfont Helvetica --fontsize 18 --left 1mm \ --right 1mm --top 1mm --bottom 1mm --gray --size 5.24x6.69in --textcolor black\ --footer . --header . --browserwidth 800 --no-embedfonts
and then specifying 1 or more web pages, I was able to generate PDFs that are easily viewable on the Reader and pages turn quickly. To top it off, it shows the images which RTF wouldn’t get me. While this isn’t an automated process (yet), this does show me that I can get decent content on the device. In addition, Project Gutenberg has lots of titles that I can put on the device. There are been some talks on websites about RSS Feeds to PDF which would be real cool, but I haven’t seen anything for the Mac.
I’ll have to keep using this to see how much I really like it, but who knows, maybe I’ll read more!