Of the recent announcements, this is probably the reader that’s probably been most eagerly awaited, with early versions having been shown some time ago – So, now we’ve got more info, what do we know…

Well, just to get some context, it’s a 11 inch x 8.5 inch x 0.3 inch device, with a 8.53 inch x 6.4 inch (that’s a 10.5 inch diagonal) touchscreen display. The display has a resolution of 944 x 1264 at 150 ppi, 8 levels of gray and is a capacitance-type touchscreen, which means that the you’re intended to use your fingers to interface with it, rather than a stylus. The reason for that choice is that it allows for the touchscreen layer to be placed below the display layer, so there’s no impact on display clarity or issues with reflections, which can occur when the touchscreen layer needs to be the top layer. In a break from the current generation of readers, the screen doesn’t use a glass substrate but a plastic one, meaning that it’s much more robust than existing readers.

There are two versions available for pre-order, with a launch date of mid-April – the 4 GB WiFi equipped version for $649 and the 8 GB version with both WiFi & 3G support for $799.

As might be guessed from the prices, these devices aren’t aimed at the leisure market – no, they’re firmly focused on the business sector, where they’re being positioned as devices that can replace the stacks of paper needed to be taken along to meetings, etc.

The devices can support the ePub/IDPF, eReader, PDF & TXT formats natively but also come with a Windows desktop application that will allow you to convert and sent Microsoft Office documents to it, either by drag & drop or by sending to it as if printing to it.. While you won’t be able to directly edit the documents on the device, you will be able to zoom in and annotate them with it. You’ll also be able to read your Outlook emails and calendars on it, although it’s still unclear if/what you’ll be able to do more than that, although you will be able to search your documents and emails.

As it supports the ePub format, it will be able to read ebooks and is being promoted through the Barnes & Noble web site. In addition, it supports a new Adobe-associated format named “truVue”, which is intended to ensure that online newspapers and magazines can used the format to display “rich graphics, multi-column layouts and integrated page controls that make your favorite paper easier and more enjoyable to read.”

It’s certainly an device with a lot of people interested in it, but it’s hard to know at the moment if it’s going to take off in the business world – the other large screen ebook reader announced at CES was the Skiff Reader, which might address the same market, although there’s no word yet on pricing and availability, so it’s impossible to know if it is a contender yet…

As an example, let’s take a look at an example of ordering a Sony Reader Touch Edition from the US. (This model was chosen as we can compare with the cost involved in buying it within the UK, while the seller used to provide the example costs, B & H Photo, is one of the relatively few US retailers who are happy to ship internationally

The current price of the Black version on the B & H Photo web-site is $279.99.

There’s free shipping in the US, but to ship internationally, their cheapest option is “UPS Worldwide Saver”, offering a delivery estimate of 3-5 business days for $51.80. OK, so far, but there’s more, as there’s also various charges for tax/duty, totaling another $101.52, broken down as follows…

Adding the cost of the Reader, the shipping and the duty together gives a grand total of $433.31, which is almost exactly £270 at the current exchange rate. This, however, compares with a street price of around £220 for a UK-sourced item, which shows it’s not always the cheap option.

Now, there are options that might bring the price down – for instance, there are companies that provide you with a US shipping address and will then repack/forward your items internationally. In this case, if you can find one that will do this for less than the UPS fee of $51.80 you’d be able to reduce your costs there, although it would take longer to reach you. If you opted to pay the duty on delivery, you’d probably be able to save the “Disbursement” and “Security & Handling” items, but you’d find that your item would again take longer to reach you, as you’d need to pay the other costs (VAT, Duty & Carrier Surcharge) before the shipping company would dispatch it to the last leg of it’s journey from arrival in the UK to you.

Anyway, the bottom-line is that while buying internationally does mean that you can get hold of products that haven’t been released in the UK, when considering it as an option it’s essential to include the associated costs – in this example, they add more than $150 to the item cost!

• The IREX DR 1000S – £599
  10.2 Inch (diagonal) eInk display with a 1024 x 1280 pixel resolution at 160 pixels per inch & a 16-level grey scale- MobiPocket & PDF with annotations
• The Kindle DX – ~£305 ($489) + taxes = ~£374 ($599) inc Taxes
  9.7 Inch (diagonal) eInk display – Kindle formats (inc Mobipocket) & PDF viewing
• The Sony Reader Daily Edition (PRS-900) – ~£250 ($399.99) plus taxes, etc
  7 Inch (diagonal) eInk display with a 600 x 1024 pixels resolution – EPUB & PDF with annotations

while the recently announced future options are:

The Plastic Logic Que – $649 (plus taxes)
10.7 Inch shatterproof touchscreen plastic display – PDF, GIF, JPEG, PNG, BMP, ePub, and TXT format, with annotation capability – Available from mid-April 2010. Supports MS Office docs via desktop conversion software.

The Skiff e-reader – Unknown price at the moment
1600x 1200 11.5 inch metallic base, flexible (shatter-proof, crack-proof) touch screen – 3G & WiFi. Largest screen, but no details on launch date.

The Entourage Edge – $490 (plus taxes)
9.7 Inch e-Ink screen + 1024 x 600 (10.1″) LCD Touch Screen Netbook – A dual-screen ‘dualbook’ running the Google Android OS.

The Kindle DX ships with a U.S. power adapter and a micro-USB cable for charging your Kindle via a computer USB port. The U.S. power adapter supports voltages between 100V – 240V, so the voltage will be fine but you’ll need an adapter to convert the US 2-pin plug to a UK 3-pin socket.

Features

• Slim: Just over 1/3 of an inch, as thin as most magazines
• Carry Your Library: Holds up to 3,500 books, periodicals, and documents
• Beautiful Large Display: 9.7″ diagonal e-ink screen reads like real paper; boasts 16 shades of gray for clear text and sharp images
• Auto-Rotating Screen: Display auto-rotates from portrait to landscape as you turn the device so you can view full-width maps, graphs, tables, and Web pages
• Built-In PDF Reader: Native PDF support allows you to carry and read all of your personal and professional documents on the go
• Wireless: 3G wireless lets you download books right from your Kindle DX, anytime, anywhere; no monthly fees, no annual contracts, and no hunting for Wi-Fi hotspots
• Books In Under 60 Seconds: You get free wireless delivery of books in less than 60 seconds; no PC required
• Long Battery Life: Read for days without recharging

Once signed up, you just need to browse to a book you’d like, although be careful, as they tend to bundle Audiobooks and eBooks together as “digital books” and you probably can’t play WMA files on your ebook reader! Anyway, find a book you like, then it should just be a matter of checking it out, with the option of going for a shorter loan than usual if you’re a fast reader.

With Essex, at least, you can only have 3 titles on loan at any one time, with choices of EPUB or Mobipocket formats – you’ll want EPUB for the Sony Reader range of ebook readers, which has an additional advantage in that the Sony eBook Library software allows you to return the loan early if you want, immediately allowing you to borrow a different book, rather than having to wait until the 7/14/21 days of the original loan have expired.

While the number of titles are limited, so you can’t check out a book that someone else has on loan unless the library has multiple copies available, you can register your interest via a wish-list, which will result in you getting a notification email when the title you’re after is available – I’d happened to browse there shortly before Dan Brown’s “The Lost Symbol” was released and registered for it so had it to read on the day of the release! (I count that as saving me some money, as I might have bought it otherwise and been disappointed – While I thought the other two Robert Langdon titles were “OK, I suppose”, this one really seemed to me to be a “Knock something quick out for the cash” one…)

Another advantage is that the Readers charge significantly faster via the external supplies than they do via USB, so you’re less likely to have to choose between missing the bus or having nothing to read! This is particularly applicable if you’ve let your Reader’s battery drain completely, as from flat, a USB-connected reader can take a very long time to even get enough power to switch on the LED to show that it is charging!

Finally, the external power supplies are much more convenient, being able to be plugged in anywhere you have a mains power supply, while the USB cable needs to be plugged into your computer.

Actually, that bears emphasising…

Wall chargers using USB connectors don’t work with Sony Readers

The type of charger you need is one with a round connector that will plug into the round (yellow) socket on the bottom of your reader. Note: While the official Sony item is quite pricey, a ‘generic’ Sony PSP charger will do fine (as long as it’s the type with a round barrel) and be much more affordable!

This may initially not make all that much difference, as the Sony’s eBook Store has only been available to US-based purchasers. With the later versions of the Sony Library software, it has been possible to access the site if your ‘Location’ setting was set to ‘US’, but once there you’d not be able to purchase much. On the other hand, they do periodically offer free titles that you can ‘buy’ without needing a payment method.

If there are titles that you do want to purchase from there, at present, the main options are to obtain a credit-card with a US address, to purchase some vouchers for the store via a third-party in the US – there’s no news that this is going to change with the other changes, though.

Sony Reader PRS-505

The Sony PRS-505 was the first Sony Reader released in the UK. While it’s nominally been superseded by the Sony Touch and Sony Pocket Editions, that doesn’t mean that it’s not worth considering, as the new Readers bracket it, rather than directly replace it! It’s got a 6″ (diagonal) eInk screen, rather than the 5″ screen of the Pocket, so is slightly larger to carry but easier to read – it doesn’t have the Touch’s features of dictionary lookup, search or annotations, but the lack of the touch-screen layer on the display means that many people find the Sony PRS-505 to (just) have the better screen for reading.

Formats

The original releases of the Sony PRS-505s supported Sony’s own LRF/LRX format as the primary formats, but a later firmware update added the industry standard ‘EPUB’ ebook format alongside the LRF/LRF formats. The PRS-505 also supports other formats such as PDF and RTF, as well as audio formats such as MP3 & AAC and JPEG graphics.

PDF viewing

The PDF support is interesting in the way that it attempts to display pages that are typically too big for an eInk screen such that they can be read, albeit with compromises. The two options when viewing a PDF file are:

1. Press and hold the ‘Zoom’ key, to toggle the Reader into ‘Landscape’ mode
2. Press the ‘Zoom’ key quickly, to enable ‘Reflow’ mode’

When in ‘Landscape’ mode the screen will display a little over half of the page and stepping forward will display the other half of the page. (The overlap is displayed faintly by design – don’t worry, your screen’s fine). This option retains all images, but the rotated page normally means that text which was too small to read when displayed as ‘Portrait’ is now readable.

The other option, ‘Reflow’, only works with text-based PDF documents, as it strips out the text from the documents and displays that, ignoring much of the original formatting. As might be anticipated, this works reasonably well for certain types of PDFs, but not at all well for others where images or formatting are important!

eBooks

In common with other eBook Readers, in addition to purchased titles, there are also many 1000′s of classic titles available to be downloaded for free, so you’ll be able to always have something to read!

Highlights

As mentioned, the Sony PRS-505 uses a 6″ eInk screen, which is a display that reflects light just like paper, rather than requiring a backlight as needed by LCD screens. What this means is no more of the eyestrain common to users of those devices – these are comfortable for long periods of reading at a time. An additional benefit of this type of screen is that it only requires power when the text is changing, which results in the Reader lasting a week or two between charges.

It can be put into standby at the slide of a switch but will immediately resume at a moment’s notice. If you want to switch between books, the Reader will automatically store your last position in each book in addition to keeping track of any bookmarks you make while reading.

You can store in the order of 150 typical titles, allowing you plenty of choice, whatever your mood, while the battery typically lasts for 1 to 2 weeks between charges. There’s a huge choice of new titles, bestsellers and classics to buy, borrow or download legally for free – You’re not tied to a single supplier and are able to obtain books both from commercial vendors and free sources as the device supports a wide range of formats including EPUB (the new industry standard), PDF, Text, RTF and Word, in addition to Sony’s own BBeB (LRF/LRX) formats.

In use, the Reader automatically saves your place in each book as you switch from title to title, in addition to being able to store multiple bookmarks in multiple books. You can view your stored eBooks by Author, Title or Date or by user-defined groups of Collections, and when reading, switch between three font sizes as desired.

Features

• Light and convenient, weighing just 220g (~8 oz), the ultra slim Reader is designed to fit easily into your bag or pocket, allowing you to take it with you wherever you go
• Easy to read 6″ E Ink® Vizplex™ paper-like screen has no backlight or flicker so you can read for hours – even in direct sunlight!
• The built-in 192MB memory easily stores around 150 eBook titles, so you can carry a mini-library with you – now more worries about finishing one book while out and about, leaving you with nothing to read!
• Capacity can be extended via Memory Card and SD card slots
• Long battery life with 6,800 continuous page turns from a single charge – enough to last up to two weeks, and get you through the longest journeys.
• Huge choice of new titles, bestsellers and classics to buy, borrow or download legally for free – You’re not tied to a single supplier!
• Supports a wide range of formats including EPUB (the new industry standard), PDF, Text, RTF and Word, in addition to Sony’s own BBeB (LRF/LRX) formats.
• Automatically saves your place in each book as you switch from title to title, in addition to being able to store multiple bookmarks in multiple books
• View your stored eBooks by Author, Title or Date or by user-defined groups of Collections
• Switch between three font sizes as desired.

Technical Specifications

Free Sources

There are a lot of free books available to download – many from copyright-expired editions, but a number of titles with titles available as ‘free samples’. These are just a few of the sites.

• Project Gutenberg – A huge collection of classic titles, growing all the time.
• ManyBooks.net – Books from Project Gutenberg and other free sources in a very wide range of formats
• The E-Books section at MobileRead – A large selection of hand-formatted classic titles in various formats. This is probably the place to look for the best looking eBooks around.
• Feedbooks – Public Domain and Original books available in a number of formats, including Custom PDF, allowing you to specify PDFs that match the size of your Reader, not just a piece of A4 paper
• Baen Free Library at WebScription.net – A large number of free books from the ‘Baen Books’ publishers (typically SciFi & Fantasy)
• The Book Depository has over 11,000 free eBooks available for download – At the moment, they’re all in PDF format, but there’s quite a range of titles there.

Commercial Sources

In addition to the high-street names such as Waterstones & WHSmith, a number of US-based eBook stores have recently opened UK sites. (The way that the book market currently works is still based around different rights being sold covering different geographical areas – as a result, sellers are having to maintain different ‘stores’ as they typically end up with eBooks that they’re only available to see to one regions, e.g. the USA, but not to another, e.g. the UK.

• Waterstones (EPUB) – Over 17,000 eBooks including bestsellers and a range of Friday Project titles at just £2.39.
• WHSmith eBooks – EPUB and MobiPocket formats available.
• WebScription.net – Multi-Format DRM-free titles available. Predominantly Science Fiction and Fantasy.
• BooksOnBoard – US-based bookstore with a UK store front.
• Fictionwise – US-based bookstore with a large range of books but be careful when selecting which format to purchase.

The new ‘nook’ eBook Reader from Barnes & Noble, which is due to start shipping shortly, has generated a huge amount of interest in the USA, combining as it does a number of advanced features together with the ‘name recognition’ of one of America’s “Main Street, USA” book-sellers. These features include a second colour touch screen, the 3G and Wi-Fi wireless support and the close integration with the physical Barnes & Noble stores.

Features

Two displays

As far as the primary display goes, the nook is based around the same 6″ (diagonal) eInk display as used in the Amazon Kindle, Sony PRS-505 & Sony Touch, but it has an additional 3.5″ colour touch screen located below the primary display. This allows a colourful “Book Cover” library display/navigation feature in addition to it’s use as a touch control panel with virtual keyboard.

Wireless

The nook is intended to go head-to-head with the Amazon Kindle, and features both 3G and Wi-Fi access, with free Wi-Fi access in all Barnes & Noble stores. In addition, nook owners are promised exclusive content and discounts via their nooks when visiting such stores. As with the Kindle, samples of eBooks are available (although this is promised for any eBook they sell, which isn’t the case for the Kindle) for free download before purchase.

Capacity

The nook has 2GB on-board storage and supports microSD cards for additional storage. The battery life is quoted as 10 days with wireless disabled, or 2 days using the wireless – a big drop, but that’s an extreme example. As might be expected, the book supports annotations, allowing you to bookmark, highlight and make notes in addition to looking-up words via the built-in dictionary.

Lending

The other big ‘new’ feature (to eBooks, at least) that the nook brings with it is the ability to share eBooks by lending them to a friend for up to 14 days at a time. (However, what’s not yet clear is if a book can be ‘lent’ more than once in it’s life – there are suggestions that it’s a one-shot deal, so it remains to be seen just how useful this will actually be…)

Supported formats

As for file formats, the nook supports ePub, eReader and PDF formats, although there are suggestions that the DRMed format that the nook is using for ePub books may mean that DRMed ePub eBooks from Barnes & Noble stores may not work on the current version of other ePub reading Readers such as the Sony Touch or Sony Pocket. It also supports MP3 audio format, and JPEG pictures.