Give Your Eyes A Break

Posted by Paul B | September 3, 2008 .

I was very fortunate over the weekend to get the chance to try out one of the new breed of electronic book readers, namely the Sony PRS eReader. They aren’t available in the UK yet but I got to play with one for a few hours.

I think everybody and there dog has heard of the Amazon Kindle, well the Sony is direct competition to that. The great thing about it though is that rather than being stuck with only reading what Amazon dream worthy enough to convert into their own format (Jane Austin anybody?) the Sony Reader allows you to read your own private documents as well such as MS Word and PDF docs after conversion.

Over the years I’ve amassed literally hundreds of PDF format e-books and when it comes to reading them there have always been 2 options, screen or print. I don’t know about you but after reading more than 800-900 words on a monitor my eyes start to wander and strain. A backlit screen no matter how great the refresh rate can cause damage, especially when you’re in this business and glued to one for anywhere between 8 and 16 hours a day. The other option is to print out the PDF onto paper. The problem I’ve got with this is that most PDF e-books tend to be the sort of thing you either only read once or maybe just refer back to every now and thin for a snippet of info. I hate lumping around great piles of loosely bound A4 as well. This is where the Sony 505PRS is going to come into its own. Upload your PDF’s (it will hold about 160) and read away without wasting ink/paper or straining your eyes. The screen is a revelation, I did read the techy specs on how it works but enough to say that it just looks….hmm….like paper really. There is no problem reading it in direct sun light (not that we ever get any sun over here) just as you would a normal book. It is scary just how well this thing works.

So after a few hours of playing I was convinced enough to go and pre-order one of the newer Sony PRS 505 models . They are due for release in the UK on the 20th of September and will set you back about £200. If it helps keep my 20/20 vision it will be money well spent in my opinion.

(You can tell just how good these things are because Amazon.co.uk aren’t stocking them, too much competition heh boys! I pre-ordered mine through Play.com)