Photo: Sony

IFA is in full swing, with Sony having day one’s major press conference and Samsung being the stars of the show today. The Japanese company took the opportunity to unveil its new range of e-readers, and as attractive they are, they have one glaring ommission. No wireless.

The new range

The updated Sony eBook readers include its 5” Pocket Edition, the 6” Touch Edition and the 7” Daily edition, with inches representing display size. And, in the interest of not leading you on, these devices look absolutely gorgeous, with the Touch Edition being our personal favourite.

E-ink, the defacto e-reader display format the Kindle and many other readers use, powers the devices’ displays and it supports various book formats, including ePub (something the Kindle does not, by the way).

‘Why so expensive?’ – you Joker’

Photo: Stock.Xchng

Sony must’ve missed, oh, all of July and August, where the prices of e-book readers cratered, because these Sony ebook readers aren’t cheap. The Sony Pocket Edition costs $179, while the Sony Touch Edition costs $229. The Sony Daily Edition will set you back $299! Seriously, Sony, that’s just $200 shy of an iPad. Why do this? And, what’s worse is us Brits will likely pay even more for these devices.
What’s worse about these obscene prices is that neither the Pocket Edition nor the Touch Edition have either wi-fi or 3G. You want to get books onto there? Plug them into your computer and transfer them over cable. Unbelievable. The Daily Edition, which is designed primarily for dowloading newspaper content has wireless capabilities, though.

Aesthetics

Aesthetically we prefer the Sony ebook readers to Amazon’s Kindle. The fact that it’s all touch-screen based is great, ditching the nigh-on useless (depending on how you use your Kindle) keypad and making for superior navigation, in general. But that price tag? Man. And the lack of wireless? Ouch. You’re making it hard to recommend picking these up

There are various other Sony e-book readers on the market already, if touch-screen is not what you’re looking for, or if you’d prefer to pay a slightly more agreeable price.

With everything going digital and on the move, the eBook readers are also being manufactured on the same track. The latest tend which is to be seen is of Portable eBook Reader which will be an ideal travelling partner for all those who love reading books. This king of eBook reader allows you to enjoy your journey and spend some leisure time reading books electronically.

The Portable eBook Reader is being manufactured by leading brands and is widely available in markets with great variety to offer. It offers great way of relaxation combined with excitement and craze to all the eBook readers. Some of the most sought after Portable eBook Reader include the Sony PRS-505S with 6.0 inch display. Compatible with formats like TXT, RTF, PDF, DOC, MPS and JPG, this reader offers hard drive space of 20MB and internal memory of 128MB.

The Endless Ideas BeBook is another Portable eBook Reader offering a resolution of 600 x 800 pixels. This stylish reader is compatible with JPF, GIF, RAR, ZIP and MP3 formats. It also allows you to save data up to 512 MB and is actually a rather cheap eBook reader. If you are looking for more expensive models with bigger displays, then you can choose from the iRex Digital Reader 1000s featuring 10.2 inch display with an excellent resolution of 1024 x 1280 pixels and supports formats including PDF, TXT, HTML, PNG, GIF and TIF. Another great product in this range is iRex iLiad Book Edition.

You can make your choice from the wide range of Portable eBook Reader available and add more excitement and relaxation to your journey. Other choices can be Interead Cool-ER 2009, Bookeen CyBook OPUS,
Sony Reader PRS-300 and many more. The leading brands manufacturing portable readers are Sony, Interead, Bookeen, Endless Idea and iRex.

The e-book reader from Sony uses an electronic paper display that has 166 dpi resolution, eight levels of greyscale and is viewable in direct sunlight. It allows the user to connect to an e-book store and displays Adobe PDFs, ePub format, personal documents, blogs, RSS news feeds, JPEGs, and Sony’s proprietary BBeB (“BroadBand eBook”) format. The e-book Reader can also play unencrypted MP3 and AAC audio files. The Sony PRS-505S E-Book Reader has a protective cover and has a sleek, muted metallic finish that is pleasing to the eye. Weighing as much as a DVD case-sized unit, it is durability and value for money. The PRS-505 has a standard USB 2.0 connector that can be used for both data transfer as well as charging.

The e-book Reader from Sony also accepts pictures in JPG, GIF, PNG, and BMP formats and it can play back MP3s and unencrypted AAC files, thus you can listen to music as you read. However playing music drains the battery quite a bit. However, the Reader doesn’t have a speaker, but it has a headphone jack and two types of memory card slots. The Sony PRS-505S has 200MB of internal storage space that shows as an externally manageable device in Windows. When a song is popped into the drive, it shows up on the Reader in a single long list. When the user begins to play the song, it plays through the list completely and then over again until the battery has been drained completely. As an e-book reader, reading text on the Reader is pleasant experience. The background is not white like in real books but a light shade of grey. There is a choice of three font sizes that allow the user to scale the text to the most comfortable level. It also has bookmark feature that helps the user continue reading from where he had left off without having to remember the page number.