When you're in love, you don't care about perfection (Sony Reader Digital Book PRS505S)

Member Name: jools_uk

Product:	Sony Reader Digital Book PRS505S
Date:	05/08/09 (71 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: A delight to use, light, slim, elegant design, just beautiful!

Disadvantages: Clunky software, very basic menus, slow page transitions

I got this for Christmas. My boyfriend obviously knows me well, it's the perfect present for me. I'm a bit of a gadget freak, but I like simple, elegant things too. And this is perfect on both counts.

So first impressions... the build quality of this is excellent. It has a metal chassis that feels nice and weighty in the hand (although it's still lighter than an average size paperback book). The buttons are all flush with the surface so even in its protective cover it's very slim (less than 1cm). I suppose it's a bit of a swizz that this is always pictured with the black leather cover, but usually comes with a brown vinyl one... but I fell in love with it pretty much instantly so can overlook its minor faults.

Mine came with some excerpts of current bestsellers pre-loaded, so straight away I could start marvelling at how the screen really does look more like paper than a piece of electronics. If you haven't seen one of these before it's pretty fascinating! There are also 100 classic books on the accompanying CD so it didn't take long before I had a good selection of books I'd always meant to get round to reading at my fingertips.

Buying books online is pretty straightforward. The software for the Sony Reader allows you to manage books on the device, and seems to integrate fairly well with Adobe Digital Editions (which you need for DRM-protected eBooks in Adobe's formats). I've had a couple of occasions where I had to go looking for an ePub file to manually import into the library - it wasn't a big deal, but I guess a less PC-literate person might need help with that.

The eBook Library software (that you use to manage your collection of books on the device) is, to be honest, not that great. It does what it's supposed to, but it isn't very intuitive and doing things like setting up collections and syncing to different locations (some to the Reader's memory, some to an SD card, for instance) is a bit clunky. Hopefully they'll fix that in a future version.

So... onto the lovely reader itself...

It's very good at being a book. And, let's face it, that's what I want from it. It's light, it sits nicely in my hand, I can carry it (and hundreds of books - thousands on the SD card) in even quite a small handbag, and it weighs less than a magazine. The text is clear and very readable, and there are three font sizes to choose from. Turning pages is a breeze, and there are buttons for left- or right-handed use. (Either the circle button on the left of the unit, or some very nice recessed buttons on the right-hand edge.) It takes probably half a second to turn a page - which doesn't sound like much, but if you lose your place and need to skip through pages it's actually pretty slow. But fortunately there are plenty of ways to get back to your last page (including a History option) so that isn't really a problem.

As for the rest of the functions... well actually it's pretty slow and clunky. You can view books by collection, author, title or date. But within those, there's no option for a secondary sort (e.g. view by collection, but sort by author within the collection). Switching between menus is slow. I'm guessing that's a limitation of the screen, but I can't say for sure. There's a build-in MP3 player and headphone socket, but it doesn't have many features and I have to say I've never even tried it.

Probably the most infuriating thing is the availability of ebooks themselves. Classics are available for free on the internet (anything old enough to be out of copyright anyway), so if you're looking to catch up on all the things you should have read in school (yes, that's me!) then you're well catered for. Otherwise though the offerings are pretty patchy. And worst of all, many eBooks cost *more* than their paperback equivalents. Hopefully if these devices take off and demand for ebooks increases, publishers will be forced to price more competitively. But until then, the range of titles available is poor and frankly it often feels like we're being ripped off. Finally, if I haven't already put you off, some titles aren't optimised for small screen reading, so pages where the layout isn't straightforward can render badly with paragraphs appearing out of order. (Have a look at a paper copy of one of the For Dummies books for an example of the kind of thing that doesn't work well.)

But... and it's a big but... this device is so beautiful and so lovely to hold and so perfectly equipped for *reading* (i.e. what it's supposed to be for) that I can overlook all these minor faults, and I still wouldn't trade it for anything else, even a UK Kindle if it existed.

Finally, as a postscript, I should mention that this book has got me reading classics I never thought I'd get round to. For that alone, it should get 5 stars.

Summary: If you pick it up and fall in love instantly, you'll overlook all its faults

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