7. Inside The Sony Reader

This is the Sony PRS-500 as seen through the CONNECT software. Here we're viewing the books in the Reader, most of which came with it. Notice that a number of the included "eBooks" are actually excerpts not the whole book. Also notice that the "Operation Guide" (sic) for the Reader is one of the eBooks. What about "Baby", "Family" and "Lampposts" and "Sleepy Time" and "Waltz for Eddie"? The first three are JPG images and the last two are MP3 files. Along with reading eBooks, you can view the images, in black and white, and listen to the MP3s on the Reader.

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You'll remember that the Sony Reader has a slot that can accommodate both Memory Stick Pro and SD cards. This significantly boosts the 64 MB of memory built into the Reader. In the next screen capture you can see the SD card I inserted in the Reader. It contains a number of images from my Canon SD700IS digital camera. When you use the Reader itself, all items of a given type are shown together within the appropriate category whether eBooks, pictures or MP3 files are stored on the Reader or on a memory card. This is a great idea. When using the CONNECT software, you see the memory card separately and can drag content to it from anywhere on the Reader or on your computer. When you use the Reader, you don't have to worry about where eBooks, images and sound files are stored. You can also drag content from a drive on your computer directly to the memory card all within Windows Explorer (My Computer). When the card is inserted in the PRS-500 the new content is ready to read, view or listen to.

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There are sources for eBooks other than the CONNECT store. Project Gutenberg has over 20,000 free eBooks online mostly in ASCII text format. I downloaded "The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci" from the Project to my computer's desktop. Then I dragged the download to my Sony Reader using the CONNECT software. Within a few seconds the 1.35 MB book was loaded onto the PRS-500. The new eBook shows up in the list of books on the CONNECT software and as one of the books in the Sony Reader itself.

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Coming from a text file, the "Da Vinci Notebooks" has no illustrations, a definite bummer for this particular book. However, text file-based eBooks behave in all ways like any eBook you buy on the CONNECT store as do Word files dragged to the Reader. Most notably, as with CONNECT eBooks, you have three type sizes (small, medium and large) to choose from. You can also drag Adobe Acrobat PDF files to the Reader. However, unlike text and Word files, type fonts in PDF files are quite small and there are only two type sizes (small and a little bigger than small), neither of which is very readable at least when the Reader displays on a portrait oriented screen. With the Reader switched to landscape mode, the second of the two type sizes is readable, but not as well as with documents in the other formats.