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Sony PRS-505/LC Blue Digital Book Reader
From Sony
List Price: $299.99
Price: $268.99

Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Ships from and sold by Vanns

Average customer review:

Customer Reviews

Good Product!
The book reader is light, easy to handle and convenient to use. I used to read for notepad, pdf files and docs. Very useful device.

best buy in 2008
I honestly believe this is the best thing I’ve bought in 2008. I always carry a few books with me in case I get bored (yes, I read pretty fast). You can imagine the weight of the books and they really cause me neck/back pain, no joke. This sony reader is the perfect thing for me. I can load so many books in it and no longer need to worry about “what books should I put in my bag today” that kind of thing. I did consider kindle because it allows me to browse internet at any time. Perhaps I would’ve got it if I didnt already have an iphone.

My only requirement of an electronic reader is to read a few books without carrying them in my bag. The sony reader 505 nails it and it looks very good compare to the Kindle. The Kindle has its own advantage but it’s just too ugly. Yes, people say you’ll get used to its shape fairly quickly but being subjective person, I just say no to it. Moreover Kindle dosent support pdf directly anyways.

The sony reader is slim and the ergonomic is very nice. You can flip pages using your left or right hand and it’s light enough to hold with one hand only. The screen, IMO, is even better than real books. I normally read books on computer but I can’t do it for long hours. Now I can read for a 5 hours straight without hurting my eyes on the sony reader!

My advice: if you read fast, read all the time, don’t care about Internet browsing and buying books on the fly, and want to get a ‘pretty’ book, get the Sony reader 505!

Just a comment on Sony’s eBook Store for the PRS-505
I assume that most owners like myself will acquire their ebooks from Sony’s econnect eBook Store (rather than try to use the handful of apps designed to convert other-source ebooks/texts to compatible formats). One of the big issues I have with this PRS-505 reader is that I love it so much, it makes me hate Sony’s eBook Store that much more. I have found that prices for Kindle titles are consistently cheaper than for the PRS-505 plus the Kindle has a greater selection available for it. Depending on how many titles you plan to purchase you may want to consider buying the Kindle instead. Yes, the Sony Reader Digital is a heck of a lot more elegant looking, but there is something about the Kindle’s ugly-ducking status that appeals to me.

The most disappointing issue with the eBook Store are the “typos” in every ebook I’ve purchased so far, and from what I’ve read online so far, this seems to be a common problem with ebooks in general. I’ve gotten everything from duplicate sentences, one after the other (in three ebooks so far) to words without spaces in-between to separate them and spacing issues of words (and also within words) in general. I don’t know what Sony uses to translate written texts into eBook formats for their Store, but they provide a link on their econnect page to email errors you find in your ebooks. They claim that as soon as the errors are fixed, they will contact you so that you can download the corrected ebook. Quite frankly, when I’m reading in bed, all warm and cozy, the last thing I want to do is have to bookmark every mistake and get on the computer to do free editing for Sony. I’m talking about more errors per ebook than I have ever seen in any printed book/textbook. Some people claim that the error counts with printed matter are similar to those of ebooks, but from what I’ve seen, ebooks are far worse.

For example, I just got out of bed to write this review because I got so annoyed with the errors in “Pardon My French”, and the mistakes are quite bad and quite numerous. Several errors with “Cruddy” (a graphic novel). Same with “Eat, Pray, Love”. Just be prepared for typos in your ebooks from Sony’s eBook Store. Some people may not be too bothered by this but I find that it disrupts the flow of the reading the story (i.e. it irritates the heck out of me).