Sony's PRS-505 eBook reader ships this month
By Thomas Ricker 
posted October 2nd 2007 1:47AM
posted October 2nd 2007 1:47AM
[Via MobileRead, thanks Alex]
posted October 2nd 2007 1:47AM
A look back on popular stories from today in a specific year.
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I'll wait for the e-ink Cybook, thank you. It has native mode support for common e-book formats. One additional reason for having e-book's over "dead tree" books...Backup. I can copy my CF chip (or SD, depending on the e-reader) to another one every few months...and put in a lockbox. If fire or flood wrecks my paper library, I can just pull out my backup...
currently there are NO ebook readers that support ALL formats of ebooks. Each one is proprietary and wants you to buy books that they support from their stoors. Until some company learns that if you support existing formats without having to translate them more people would be willing to buy until then each device will have a very short life. remember Gem, rocket, RCA. most of those are gone now. Even all of the next generation of readers each only support their own native format and maybe PDF, html; if you are really lucky they might even throw in txt rtf or really generous ones might have translation capabilities for rocket and limited DRM support.
I already own hundreds of ebooks in Microsoft Reader format but in order to make them more portable I need to have a device other than a laptop that understands that format. Now I am reading them on a Pocket PC device that has a 2x3.5 inch screen. LCD, Color etc but small.
What I really would like to see is a reader that supports existing formats protected or not, adjustable text capability, color, good size screen reading area, text to speech functions, search, highlighting and bookmark functions. What i don't really need on a reader is video and music players. yes it is nice to be able to listen to music while reading but the purpose is primarily a book reader. get that part right first then add options like wifi.
but hey who is listening to us consumers surely not the manufacturers or else we would already have these in every bookstore and ebooks would be more mainstream.
You are right about no hardware supporting all e-book formats. I merely said common formats. At I was wrong about even that as things have turned out. From my viewpoint, DRM encryption is the big killer. I have personally standardized all my books on one of two formats - RTF and HMTL. I won't buy an encrypted book. So when I buy an unencrypted propritary format, I convert it into one or the other formats. For Microsoft reader format (.lit), I use ABC Amber LIT Converter. Easy, simple, quick (200 page book in 1-2 minutes)and FREE.
A bit of philosophy. Data should be immortal. Any method of limiting it, whether it be propritary formats or DRM blocks this fact. I don't mind converting from one format to another over time, as long there is no data loss. So once it's digital
back it up and keep on converting... Seriously, the most common clear formats wil be around for many decades simply because of the wealth of data in them. WAV's been around more than 20 years, .txt files for 40 years(the DEC world, not just PC's). I suspect HTML will be around a long time too.
You're right about not listening to the consumer. The fear of piracy is so overpowering that the publishing world would rather have 100% of nothing that 5% of a huge pie. And the consumer is left with the unappetizing choice of doing without or becoming crooks....
I guess they have it in black too...
While you can't search a printed book, many printed manuals, books and reference materials have tabs and chapters that are easy to reach. I know you can electronically "bookmark" pages, but the display of the prs-500 showed at most 7 or 8 at a time. For reference manuals that have upwards of 100 tabs, the ability to search would be essential. Even a featue that alowed you to search the chapter index or bookmark names would be great at handling large reference books. I think this feature would make the PRS-505 a killer product.
With a search featue or even a search for indexed items feature many companies could switch to e-books for manuals and such. I would dump the load of paper books I have to carry in a heartbeat if I could have them in electronic form with a quick and efficient way to get to the information I need.
Why would I buy one if it's not Mac compatible? They're not getting my $300 until I can use this on my Mac.