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Sony e-reader

  • 07-08-2008 8:05pm
    #1
    Registered Users Posts: 115 ✭✭


    I note that the sony e-reader is coming out in the UK in September - does anyone know if and when it is coming out here? There is nothing on the Sony Ireland website.


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Comments

  • Closed Accounts Posts: 4,291 ✭✭✭eclectichoney


    Hmm I'm tempted! Was just going to start a thread. Waterstones on dawson street will have it for €250 on Sept 4th I think.


  • Moderators, Regional North West Moderators Posts: 19,088 Mod ✭✭✭✭byte
    byte


    I've seen that it'll only load ebooks bought in the Sony shop which are in a proprietary Sony format....

    Seems as stupid as their first "mp3" players being only able to play Atrac files.


  • Registered Users Posts: 115 ✭✭brendor


    Hmm I'm tempted! Was just going to start a thread. Waterstones on dawson street will have it for €250 on Sept 4th I think.

    Can i ask where you heard this?


  • Moderators, Category Moderators, Motoring & Transport Moderators Posts: 21,235 CMod ✭✭✭✭Eoin


    byte wrote: »
    I've seen that it'll only load ebooks bought in the Sony shop which are in a proprietary Sony format....

    Seems as stupid as their first "mp3" players being only able to play Atrac files.

    Why do they keep doing stuff like this? They really missed the boat with the MP3 players. Now they probably have some of the nicest mini-MP3 players, but it's too late.

    They also sold an amplifier for your home cinema that also streamed media from your PC. But the catch was that the PC had to be a Sony. Real shame, as the amp itself was top notch.


  • Registered Users Posts: 2,790 ✭✭✭John_Mc


    It's just Sony's business model. Force customers to use their format or accessories, which are always more expensive than the standard.

    This approach applies to their Laptops, cameras, mp3 players etc.

    I've stopped buying sony since they were caught red handed installing new copyright security additions to windows media player without user consent or permission, which is effectively hacking your computer :mad:


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  • Registered Users Posts: 115 ✭✭brendor


    Jesus lads i only want to know when i can buy the thing in Ireland- im not asking you to buy it nor do i particularly care whether or not any of you buy Sony stuff or not!


  • Moderators, Category Moderators, Motoring & Transport Moderators Posts: 21,235 CMod ✭✭✭✭Eoin


    brendor wrote: »
    Jesus lads i only want to know when i can buy the thing in Ireland- im not asking you to buy it nor do i particularly care whether or not any of you buy Sony stuff or not!
    Nice.


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 4,291 ✭✭✭eclectichoney




  • Moderators, Regional North West Moderators Posts: 19,088 Mod ✭✭✭✭byte
    byte


    bedlam wrote: »
    Nope, It has supported 4 different formats since the get go and it now has epub support which should make getting books from 3rd parties a lot easier in the future.

    Granted at the moment if you want to buy recently release ebooks you are going to have to go with the drm'd books from the Sony Store. There's also lots of content from Feedbooks if you like the classics as well as access to more modern Creative Commons licensed books.

    Personally for anyone looking for a 6" screen eReader, I'd currently recommend the Bookeen Cybook. Very nice machine, incredibly light (almost 85g lighter than Reader) super thin and format wise it supports mobipocket (which you can deDRM) among others whthh epub support forthcoming.

    OpenInkPot are working on ports for both devices which will again give users (willing to replace firmware) more choice
    Ah, right. Thanks for clarification.

    It was one of 3 eBook gadgets tested on the Gadget Show on five a week or two ago.


  • Registered Users Posts: 267 ✭✭Tom


    Got one of these last October in the US on the release day of the 505. New firmware has just been released to read PDF's correctly - most of the books I had are in this format - beore the new firmware it was easier to save the PDF as text but now it presents them perfectly.

    It is also supposed to work with Adobe Digital Editions - haven't tried this yet. Anyone know any good sites that sell ePub format books to Irish customers?


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  • Moderators, Motoring & Transport Moderators, Music Moderators Posts: 12,778 Mod ✭✭✭✭Zascar


    I'd love to get one of these - for some reason I think I'd use it more than a book.

    Can you put any pdf on it that you find online etc, or do you have to buy it from their store etc?


  • Registered Users Posts: 1,503 ✭✭✭ElNino


    I have a Sony Ereader since Christmas I would highly recommend it.

    There is an excellent cross-platform open source free library management application called Calibre which I use to add and delete books to my Ereader. Calibre supports conversion from (HTML, LIT, RTF, TXT, PDF(simple text+few images)) to the SONY ebook reader format LRF and it is regularly updated. It works with the Sony firmware.

    You can download it here:
    http://calibre.kovidgoyal.net/
    It doesn't work with 64 bit Windows.


  • Registered Users Posts: 3,906 ✭✭✭J-blk


    ElNino wrote: »
    I have a Sony Ereader since Christmas I would highly recommend it.

    ElNino, I've been very tempted to get one of these since it came out in the US (had people on two occasions try to get me one but they were always out of stock...) but I'd really like to hear a first hand account of how the Reader handles PDF in particular? I have a lot of technical/programming eBooks in PDF, which is what I would want to mainly use on it and I'm not sure they will be easy to read. Can the Reader zoom in on PDF at all?

    Beyond that, does it handle CHM (or can CHM easily be converted for it)? Thanks.


  • Registered Users Posts: 3,906 ✭✭✭J-blk


    bedlam wrote: »
    Sounds like the iLiad would be better suited for you. It handles any technical book in PDF format I've thrown at it admirably with out the need for zooming due to its larger 8" screen.

    Yep, I've looked at the iLiad and it is very impressive (I really like the ability to take notes) but I'm not sure I can justify the at least double (for the Book Edition) asking price over the Sony Reader - that's why I'm interested in some first hand account of how the Reader deals with PDF. There are plenty of reviews out there that mention problems but these are all from the original 2006 launch and I'd really like to know how things are now...


  • Registered Users Posts: 1,503 ✭✭✭ElNino


    J-blk wrote: »
    ElNino, I've been very tempted to get one of these since it came out in the US (had people on two occasions try to get me one but they were always out of stock...) but I'd really like to hear a first hand account of how the Reader handles PDF in particular? I have a lot of technical/programming eBooks in PDF, which is what I would want to mainly use on it and I'm not sure they will be easy to read. Can the Reader zoom in on PDF at all?

    No, you can't zoom on PDFs. PDF support is much better with the new firmware as it reflows text based PDFs but I still find it hard to read PDFs. There are utilities available to convert PDFs to Sony's LRF format but I have tried them. The Mobileread forum has a lot of information on this topic http://www.mobileread.com/forums/
    Beyond that, does it handle CHM (or can CHM easily be converted for it)? Thanks.

    It doesn't handle CHM so you need to decompile to HTML and convert to LRF
    or a better solution would be to use ABC Amber CHM Converter to convert to LIT which converts very well to LRF using Calibre. The software costs $20 here http://www.processtext.com/abcchm.html


  • Registered Users Posts: 3,906 ✭✭✭J-blk


    Thanks for the replies ElNino - much appreciated. I guess I have to take everything on board, the iLiad may indeed be a better fit for my needs but the cost is very high by comparison to the Reader. I'm also wondering if Amazon will go ahead with an international Kindle launch anytime soon (and hopefully a version that's not as fugly) so maybe waiting awhile longer might be the best option.


  • Registered Users Posts: 3,906 ✭✭✭J-blk


    bedlam wrote: »
    You know you want to ;)

    That's the problem, I'd love to get one :D The missus might kill me though, given the amount of gadget spending... maybe if I convince her it's for her - she loves reading after all :).


  • Registered Users Posts: 3,906 ✭✭✭J-blk


    So I ended up getting one of these after all. The screen is amazing and the lag between page changes is a lot shorter than I thought.

    For anyone interested, Waterstones has started selling them since Thursday. I picked mine up in the Jervis Street one today (I hadn't pre-ordered, just walked in and asked for one).


  • Registered Users Posts: 17,958 ✭✭✭✭RuggieBear


    how is it with normal pdf's?


  • Registered Users Posts: 3,906 ✭✭✭J-blk


    RuggieBear wrote: »
    how is it with normal pdf's?

    I was pretty surprised TBH - it has three levels of zoom and these seem to work on all the PDFs I've thrown at it so far. At the large setting, it's very comfortable to read almost anything and you're not zooming in/out to read more pages - it's pretty seamless and just adds more pages (so if the text you were reading would fit in one page in "small" print, it may take three in large) . I really thought I was going to have problems with PDFs based on some comments here, but I'm very pleasantly surprised.

    The Waterstones in the Jervis Center has a couple of demo kiosks set up so you can play with it a bit - seeing the page refresh in person (which I thought was going to be terrible) kinda sold me on it.


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  • Registered Users Posts: 2,127 ✭✭✭Sesshoumaru


    J-blk wrote: »
    I was pretty surprised TBH - it has three levels of zoom and these seem to work on all the PDFs I've thrown at it so far. At the large setting, it's very comfortable to read almost anything and you're not zooming in/out to read more pages - it's pretty seamless and just adds more pages (so if the text you were reading would fit in one page in "small" print, it may take three in large) . I really thought I was going to have problems with PDFs based on some comments here, but I'm very pleasantly surprised.

    The Waterstones in the Jervis Center has a couple of demo kiosks set up so you can play with it a bit - seeing the page refresh in person (which I thought was going to be terrible) kinda sold me on it.

    What kind of PDFs have you read on it? Technical stuff or just novels?


  • Registered Users Posts: 3,906 ✭✭✭J-blk


    What kind of PDFs have you read on it? Technical stuff or just novels?

    Technical stuff only so far - some books on Ruby, general programming, Mac OS X - all fine, even the ones that have a lot of diagrams/graphics in them. I tried a few jpgs from cbr (comic book files) and these would need a lot of zooming/scrolling so not ideal. I'd say you'd have the same problem with PDFs of magazines which are entirely made up of images, but "standard" PDFs seem just fine.


  • Registered Users Posts: 14,325 ✭✭✭✭jimmycrackcorm


    I'm interested in getting one of these for all my collection of PDF computer books but I'm wondering if they are at all practical. I've hear some people have success with some sort of conversion program from pdf to native format.


  • Registered Users Posts: 3,906 ✭✭✭J-blk


    I'm interested in getting one of these for all my collection of PDF computer books but I'm wondering if they are at all practical. I've hear some people have success with some sort of conversion program from pdf to native format.

    There's Calibre which ElNino posted about (it's one of the first posts on this page) and that can convert PDFs to LRF which is the Reader's native format. Still, I've loaded a few PDFs on now (mostly programming related) and the only one that looks kinda wonky is not much improved by converting it to LRF. If you can get into a Waterstones, you can a take a look at one as you kinda need to see it in action - just try setting the zoom to a higher level (there's a button at the bottom left) because the ones I saw in store were set to the smallest scale.


  • Registered Users Posts: 14,325 ✭✭✭✭jimmycrackcorm


    I had a look at the one in Waterstones in Dawsno street, but the sample books are the native ones. I'm kind of thinking though that it might be ok to convert pdfs to the native format anyway as I only want to read. If I want to cross-reference stuff then I'll do that on my laptop.


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 11 mrbloo


    It's all a bit moot, as neither Dawson Street nor Jervis Street have any for sale right now, and they won't have any for "two to three weeks". Even then, they will be honouring pre-orders first (for a €50 deposit), so even in two-three week's time, there might still be none in stock.

    One of the staff in Jervis told me that after setting aside the pre-orders when they first came in, there were three (!) copies left for the shelves, and they went in an afternoon.

    I wouldn't hold my breath on them not ****ing up the order quantities for the next one, useless gob****es. It seems that they really want people to pre-order and I can't understand why - especially when the demand is at least quantifiable at this stage.


  • Registered Users Posts: 3,906 ✭✭✭J-blk


    mrbloo wrote: »
    One of the staff in Jervis told me that after setting aside the pre-orders when they first came in, there were three (!) copies left for the shelves, and they went in an afternoon.

    That's not true - they went on sale on Thursday the 4th, I went into the Jervis Waterstones on Saturday the 6th and bought one. I hadn't preordered or anything.

    I also think the stock allocation has something to do with Sony... This place will also deliver to Ireland, but will not have stock until the 19th and again, they seem to be putting a huge emphasis on preorders:

    http://www.advancedmp3players.co.uk/shop/product_info.php?currency=EUR&cPath=4&products_id=3335


  • Registered Users Posts: 14,325 ✭✭✭✭jimmycrackcorm


    I asked about them in the sony shop in Liffey Valley and they had stock, but the price was 260 something, dearer than Waterstones.


  • Registered Users Posts: 3,906 ✭✭✭J-blk


    Just saw an ad on Channel 6 - apparently Xtravision is now selling it too, exact same price as Waterstones => €249.


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  • Banned (with Prison Access) Posts: 23,089 ✭✭✭✭rovert


    Is it compatable with the Amazon Kindle books?


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