Sony Reader PRS-505 gets spine ripped (carefully) off

'Twas inevitable, really. Shortly after Amazon's Kindle hit the hands of eager early adopters, someone with a extra dash of curiosity showed us what the guts looked like, and now it's time for Sony's own Reader to experience the same. One dutiful owner managed to strip the proverbial spine right off, leaving the pages bare and the circuitry exposed, but hey, that's exactly how we like it. Go on, peep the read link for the whole set -- they always said to never judge an (e)-book by its cover.

[Via Igorsk]

[Jon @ Dec 21st 2007 9:12AM]

Hot! Needs more of this.

[Growat @ Dec 21st 2007 9:30AM]

I was all set to buy one of these this Christmas. I'm a huge fan of ebooks (on my PDA) but wasn't happy with the refresh rate and button placement on the 500 so I waited. HAd the photo of the 505 taped up in my office......and then the Kindle came out. Now I have no idea what to get. A sleek, well designed, heavily DRM-ed, overpriced content SR-505, or the fisher-price, slower refresh, better content, wi-fi Kindle.
Think I'll wait another year.

[n.p. @ Dec 21st 2007 11:42AM]

the 505 isn't exactly heavily DRM'd. i have no idea where that notion comes from. i have bought a couple of things from the sony site but for the most part, i've downloaded from other sources and .txt files seem to work best. project gutenberg actually has a lot of content -- more than you could ever want, actually. just get creaive, but i've had mine a couple of days and love the ever living shit out of it.

[whatsdamattau @ Dec 21st 2007 6:48PM]

Had my 505 since October and not a day goes by that I don't use it to read the Wall St. Journal, Newsweek, BBC news, or Engadget on it. Oh, I read books on it too. One of the reasons why I like the Reader over the Kindle (other than looks) is that I don't need to pay for everything I want to do with the machine. I can get newspaper and magazine subscriptions for free, books from mobileread.com and gutenberg.org (to name a couple) for free, convert my books from txt, pdf, html, rtf and throw them into my reader for free. All those things cost money on the Kindle.

The refresh rate from going from page to page isn't all that bad. You can time your button pressing for the next page to correspond to your reading speed.

I love mine and now that Borders has joined up at bordersmedia.com and the fact that the Reader will be compatible with the new Adobe Digital Edition just make it that much better.

[Za @ Dec 21st 2007 2:14PM]

I played with one for the first time last night and I was very impressed with screen contrast and build quality. Refresh time between pages was a bit too long though, and I would still wait until they got a larger screen.