Chris J. Karr, January 4th, 2008

Several weeks ago, I began discussing integrating Books with portable electronic book readers. In the time since then, I acquired a Sony Reader (PRS-505) and I have been spending quite a bit of time with it evaluating its potential usefulness in a Books context. These are my thoughts and observations. 

While Amazon’s Kindle sparked my interest and imagination, I chose the Sony reader because it was cheaper, uses the same basic technology as the Kindle, and has been reverse-engineered to the point that open source management applications exist for the reader. My idea was to get something a bit older and “hackable” so that I could begin integrating the device with Books instead of having to wait for a newer device to become suitably deconstructed and documented over the course of several months.

Overall impressions

I’ve been very happy with this device and I think that it’s almost as cool as the iPhone. Make no mistake, reading books on this device is quite a bit different than with a traditional printed volume, but I wouldn’t really judge the experience any better or worse than reading a physical book – it’s simply different.

For one thing, I love the fact that I can now approach my reading in the same manner as I consume media such as audio and video. I like to always have a queue of unheard/unread/unwatched items and pick away at that list at my leisure. I’ve already loaded mine up with about a hundred classics that I’ve always meant to read and I’ve been picking through those books while I’m on the bus, in bed for the night, or at my desk between tasks. Given the reasonable size of the device, I can carry easily a bookshelf’s worth of content with me at all times. For my recreational and fiction reading, this has already induced a significant shift in how I read books.

Physically, the device is quite sturdy and “feels right”. It has enough heft to make it feel like a real physical object, but isn’t so bulky as to prevent me from taking it everywhere. The device is not small enough to fit in a pocket, but I’m fine with this tradeoff because I enjoy the larger reading surface. To test my appropriateness of size theory, I generated content for both the Sony Reader and the iPhone and found that all else being equal, reading on the Sony is much more enjoyable.

Obtaining content

A reader without books is not much of a reader at all. The Sony Reader is a mixed bag when it comes to content. The bad news is that in order to obtain any recent content for the device, I have to use Sony’s Windows-only Connect online store. This is essentially a cheap knock-off of the iTunes store for electronic books. That said, the content available in that store isn’t bad and I’ve already purchased and read several novels from Sony’s store.

This leads us to the topic of file formats. The native format for the device is something called BroadBand eBook (BBeB). This format comes in two flavors, encrypted and unencrypted. Obviously, most content sold on the Sony store is in the encrypted format that has a digital rights management (DRM) scheme much like iTunes. When first using the store I created an account and “activated” both my PC and Reader device. Only “activated” devices can open and read these protected files (just like iTunes and Audible content).

In addition to the encrypted BBeB format, there’s an unencrypted version that can be generated using programs such as Book Designer (Windows, commercial) and libprs500 (multi-platform, open-source). Behind both of these formats are documented XML formats that are used to generate files in these formats.

The Sony Reader also supports PDF, plain-text, and rich text (RTF) files. For the purposes of getting to know the device, I targeted PDF as my format for generating new books for the device. Using Microsoft Word and the Mac’s “Print to PDF” functionality, I was able to create attractive files on par with those purchased in the Sony store. Over a couple of hours, I managed to digitize H.P. Lovecraft’s pre-1920 work using a standard Word template that I designed. I also went ahead and digitized his 1936 novel The Shadow Out of Time. (Click the link to see the file.) From this experience, I’m happy to report that if you have an unencrypted digitized text, loading that content onto the device is not a problem at all.

Since the device presents itself to the host operating system as a flash disk drive, actually copying content to the device is as simple as dragging and dropping the files from a folder on the local hard disk into a folder on the device.

Things that could be better

I’m happy with the device’s readability and openness to content, there are a couple of issues. In no particular order:

1. Native PDF support is primitive. In my own tests creating content, I had the advantage of controlling the formatting completely. This worked well because I crafted the pages to fit the device and adjusted the fonts accordingly. However, this device is terrible at reading standard 8.5 by 11.0 PDF files. It has no ability to alter the page dimensions to better suit the device and it’s zooming support is poor. In my own work, I would have loved to use this device in conjunction with Yep to manage the backlog of academic papers I need to read, but this won’t be happening any time soon with this device.

2. The user interface supports “sequential access” well, but “random access” poorly. This device is great if you plan on reading through books one sequential page at a time. It’s not so great if you need to use a book as a reference or other source that demands being able to quickly choose arbitrary pages. Next and previous page controls are great for novels – but not so great for dictionaries. Furthermore (unlike the Kindle), this device does not include any kind of search functionality. It does include bookmarks for marking arbitrary pages for random access later on, but this feature does not make up for the other shortcomings.

3. The user interface is slow. I would have liked to see a more responsive user interface. When loading a large amount of content (such as the King James Version of the Bible), the device will freeze for several seconds. Hitting buttons during this time only queues them up, so once the device becomes active again, all of the actions associated with those queued presses happen at once. Furthermore, the eInk display does do a black flash between page turns and other transitions.

What’s nextWhile I’ve been playing with this device as a user, I’ve also been poking at its internals as a developer. I’m happy to report that it will be relatively simple to set up Books to publish content to this device and do things like monitor reading progress. I would like to thank Kovid Goyal for his excellent work on libprs500. While I likely won’t use libprs500 code or libraries in the next iteration of Books (I will likely use native Obj-C), it has served as great documentation for describing how to interoperate with the device.

For my own purposes, I’d like to get a version of Books that works with this device online soon. As I’ve stated before, this will be part of the next major iteration, Version 4. There are no major hurdles preventing this from happening – I just need to find the time to put everything together. Given that my academic duties will soon take precedence again, I don’t expect to release anything publicly until around the summer. However, over the next couple of months, I do plan on posting UI designs and other requests for feedback.

Once support for the PRS-505 solidifies and matures, I’ll begin adding support for other electronic readers. I don’t really think that there is anything too unique about this reader, so translating the relevant concepts from one device to another should be relatively straightforward. If you have a specific reader that you’d like supported, please consider supporting the effort financially, because I’ll need to acquire these devices myself in order to properly support them. If you’d like a Reader of your own, I have purchase links to the this one and others online at the Audacious Software store.