So let me preface this article that I used to love reading when I was a kid.  You couldn't pry an R.L. Stine book from my hands till I had demolished it.  I had required reading growing up, but in high school and then college, I had the choice of my required reading significantly reduced, this lead to my disdain of reading books.

Also I picked up some weird quirks about reading books.  Such as an irrational hatred towards soft cover books.  This leads me to my love for hardcover books, which can be hard to find a book in sometimes, especially cheap.  Finally I think I may have solved these problems with my recent purchase.  I broke down after a long time of wanting an E-Reader and got the Sony PRS-505.  There was a sale going on where it was 40 dollars cheaper and I cashed in.

So I've had the device for almost a month now and what do I think?

Huge Success.

One of my main reasons for getting the E-Reader is that I love gadgets and playing with them.  The idea was if I was playing with a gadget, maybe I could trick myself into reading more.  I used to love it so much when I was a kid, so there must be a way to bring that back.  The Sony PRS-505 has done a good job.  Since I've gotten it I've read one and a half books.  This is pretty good for me as I don't read anywhere near as fast as I used to combined with how much other media I take in a week.

The screen is really like reading paper to me.  Some people complain about the grey color of the screen, but this is not an issue for myself.  I had friends and associates say they would rather read from a computer screen then buy an E-Reader.  The same people shown the Sony PRS-505 after the statement took it back.  Most people were amazed they didn't get any type of eyestrain.  In fact there seems to be this misinformation surrounding E-Readers in general that they are just an LCD screen in book size.  Trust me they are not.

The next "annoyance" with the device is the flash the screen makes.  This flash lasts a fragment of a second, which I find to be trivial.  To me it takes about as much time as turning a page and after reading about 10 pages I totally forgot that the device even made the flash.

Now I can't review too much on the Sony software as I have a Macbook Pro.  Note for Mac users, the device shows up as a storage drive meaning you can drag and drop books onto it.  I was able to install Sony's software using Parallels and putzed around with it in coherence mode.  It's pretty much like iTunes only for books.  Even the layout is strikingly familiar to Apple's music software.  The PRS-505 came with 100 free downloads of "classic" books which are available from many sources online for free such as the Google Book Search.  The difference is that these books are formatted for the reader, with bookmarks and a glossary.

I checked out the store as well.  The prices don't seem too bad, but to me I always feel that if I do not own a physical version of a book that it should be a little bit cheaper.  The prices are about on par with a soft cover book, sometimes cheaper, sometimes more.  The best bet is to buy a series where you will save more money.  The books prices wise are around the same as Amazon's Kindle prices, so one isn't better then the other as far as book price is concerned.  Remember this review isn't a comparison between the two devices since I have not played with a Kindle.  I merely compared prices because it is the other main competitor next to eBooks.com which also has similar prices.

The book has about 200 mbs of internal storage, which is more then enough room for the amount of reading even an avid reader does in a week to hold a significant library.  The best part is that you can expand it up to 10 gigs of space.  With the average size of the ebooks I've loaded onto the reader of about 2 megs (which is a rather large book mind you).  If I did my math correctly (please correct me if I did it wrong) a gig holds 1024 megabytes, which would mean 10 gigabytes would hold 10240 megabytes.  Which means if every book was 2 megabytes that would be 5120 books that this thing could hold.  I don't care who you are, if you read a book a day, that's still about 14 years worth of books.  No one would probably never have that many books on the device, but it's mind-boggling.  Also remember my math doesn't include the internal storage either.

One of my major gripes about the Sony PRS-505 is that there is no way to sort pictures.  Because of this if you put several folders worth of pictures they will all show up together.  Why would this be a big issue?  If you have downloaded any Manga there is no way to sort it without changing all of the picture names.  A little annoying, but at the same time it's not the devices main priority.  There is Manga up on Sony's site, but I have yet to download any.  The other annoyance is that when I load the reader while using it as a storage device it takes longer for the device to start up afterwards then it does from the Sony Software as it re-catalogues everything.  This was really annoying when I put a gigs worth of Manga on a SD card.  I had to walk away from the device for about 15 minutes before it was usable only to find out that all of the pictures were sorted together which made reading the manga I had put on the device next to impossible.

So I think I've rambled enough about the Sony PRS-505.  When it comes down to it, I think I will be reading most of my books this way from now on.  It's less weight then a book, uses less space, and for me is fun to read on.  I'm curious to see where E-Ink is headed.

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