Typical: 5 weeks after I wrote a review of long-term experiences with my eBook Reader in which I said, “the hardware has worked flawlessly”, I hit a problem last week, so much so I thought I was going to have to send it back to Sony for repair.

The problems started when I ran the battery completely flat for the first time ever. I charged it the next day and, having connected it to my PC in work for about 5 hours, found that it was still flat. I unplugged it and tried again, and it started to take the charge. For the next couple of days, I noticed that the battery seemed to be running down unusually fast: I was finding that I needed to charge it every day. I didn’t notice the cause of this until Thursday: I couldn’t turn the device off [or more specifically put it into standby mode].

I googled this and couldn’t find any articles on people having a similar problem. Some people have had issues with the on/off button detaching, but nothing sounding similar to what I was seeing. I dived back into the manual and found the power off functionality in the top level menu. I never really figured this as a long term fix, but we’re going on holidays in just over two weeks and I was starting to think about the likelihood of a round trip to a repair centre, so I was looking for a sticking plaster. This worked for about a day, but the device became completely unresponsive on Friday night.

I’d tried a few remedies. I had recently uploaded my first PDF content, so thinking that that might be corrupt in some way I deleted it. When that didn’t work I tried deleting everything, using the top level menu item. Either this takes longer than I had patience for [an hour] or else didn’t work at all [my money is on the latter]. Soft resetting, with the recessed button on the back in combination with the on/off button failed as well, and eventually locked the device up completely. At this point I assumed that it was irretrievable, as it was completely unresponsive. I gave it another charge the following morning, and while I was waiting, I tried googling for a hard reset key combination [I had previously googled just for ‘reset’, not explicitly a ‘hard reset’]. This, finally, worked. Unplugging the reader from the USB prompted a reboot. While this was happening, I held down the bookmark and volume key, which prompted the full reset, restoring the device to factory settings. This requires the re-authorisation of the ePub account with Adobe.

With the benefit of hindsight, it was a pretty nasty way for the device to fail. The recovery process was effective, but not an awful lot of use if the device crashes when you are lying on a beach somewhere. It remains to be seen if it’s the start of a pattern or a one-off.

It’s just under six months since I bought my eBook, and I thought it would be interesting to summarise what it’s like to use one of these devices over the long term, at a time when Sony has just released a couple of new models.

I’ve ordered 16 ebooks, all from Waterstones, at an average price of £6.99 per book. I’ve had mixed results with the other online stores available in the UK, most notably W H Smiths. I tried to buy a couple of books on separate occasions. The first time, there was a tax added to the price at the checkout which made it more expensive than Waterstones; the second time there were repeated servers error when I tried to place the order. I haven’t been back since.

Waterstones is reasonably good, but it’s hard to get out of the mindset that Amazon has instilled in me in terms of price: I simply can’t cease to be surprised at how expensive the ebooks are. I enjoy the convenience, but I’m not prepared to pay much over the odds for an electronic copy. One example of this was Azincourt by Bernard Cornwell. When this was first released as an ebook, it was around £13 [it has subsequently dropped to £6.39 at the time of writing], which didn’t compare favourably with £3.99 that Sainsbury was charging for the paperback. I’ve therefore not stuck exclusively with the eBook reader over the last few months.

The selection of books that are on offer, whether it’s because of the price or ebook availability, has changed my reading patterns. This is both a positive and a negative: I’ve tried and enjoyed books simply because of the immediacy of the selection and delivery process. Equally I’ve been frustrated by non availability of titles. If you are thinking of buying one, I’d suggest sitting down with a pen and paper and researching the next 10 books that you are thinking of buying, and then seeing how many of them you can actually find in electronic form. That might sound like a hassle, but the cost of the device warrants the effort and I guarantee that there will be some divergence from your wishlist. What I did, and what I imagine most people do, was to sit down and browse through the charts in Waterstones, and think ‘yep, this looks like a runner’. You need to dig deeper.

Another unexpected, albeit minor, annoyance is with the quality of some of the ebooks themselves. I’ve just finished the Pillars of the World by Ken Follett, which was fantastic. But I found this quite distracting:

Every single accented character in the book is represented incorrectly in the text. This is not an endemic problem with the ebook reader itself, just this [and at least one other] title. I can only guess that something has gone wrong with the encoding of the epub file. It also had more typing errors than I’d expect to see in a book. It’s an old title [originally published in 1989]. I was wondering [and this is major speculation] if it was something to do with the age of the original manuscript. Perhaps what gets produced further down the line in the production of the physical book wasn’t available or amenable to conversion to the epub format, and what has been used is actually quite an early version of the text [despite the much more up to date forward].

One final annoyance is with footnotes. I decided to give my first ever Terry Pratchett book a whirl and the title [Guards! Guards!] has lots of them. The inline references were converted to asterisks which hyperlinked to a numeric list on a page. There are two problems with this: the jumping forwards and back within the file is quite slow, but it’s also only possible to hyperlink to a page, rather than to a point in a page, so there was no way of correlating the individual links to the items in the list. This is obviously easy to solve, with numeric links. But the speed of the transition from one section of the file to the other is sufficiently slow that reading, say, a proper textbook would be a fairly painful experience.

So there a couple of niggles with the Reader but I still love it. Going on holiday with 3 books installed was an absolute godsend: that’s when it really comes into its own. I’m probably reading more than I did before I got the device. This is in a small part due to the fact that I have dropped a magazine subscription, but in the main it’s because of the reader. I’ve also just installed the Mac version of the synchronisation software and also Adobe Digital Editions which all seems to be working very well.

The hardware has worked flawlessly. The screen works fantastically well in every type of lighting condition, including blazing sunshine. The battery life is very impressive: I get a couple of weeks of hard use between charges. Sony do design their toys very well, it’s got to be said.

So bottom line, would I recommend one? Not unreservedly. The pricing of the ebooks, and the reader itself, underlines the fact that these devices are a luxury.

A departure from my normal content, and the last posting for what has been a busy day for the site. I got an eBook reader for my birthday about 3 weeks ago. I was torn between the reader and getting the lesser of the two SpeedLites, the 430EX II, which weighs in at roughly the same price. I think I push my luck with my friends with my photography addiction at the best of times, and blinding them into the bargain – well, maybe one for next year.

I’ve been looking at getting an eBook reader off and on for about the last year. I have a long commute – about 1.5 hours each way – and tend to chew my way through a lot of books. I also tend to read quite a lot of hardbacks, which I never take on holiday given the bulk / weight.

The primary concern has always been content: the options in the UK, which remains Kindle-less, seem to be a lot more limited than in the US. The site that changed my mind was Waterstones, which has quite an extensive catalogue. The pricing can be a shock to the system given what we have grown used to c/o Amazon, but there is the odd bargain to be had.

The battery life, page-turn refresh rate, user interface, and screen readability are all as advertised: fantastic. The software is the only wrinkle that I’ve found. It’s frustrating that it’s a PC only option for any books that are DRM protected. I tried a number of options on my Mac, with varying – and generally low – degrees of success. I refuse to use BootCamp to dual boot: it just has ‘should have bought a PC’ written all over it. I had a quick look at emulation, and first stop was Wine, which has transformed into a commercial product called CodeWeavers CrossOver Mac. I couldn’t get it to work, and googling suggested that no-one else had tried. The next option I could have taken was Parallels which I know works, but throw in the cost of the software, and a copy of XP, and it was starting to look like an expensive option.

I have had a play with Calibre, the open source solution for communicating with the eBook. It works pretty nicely. The mechanism for recursively downloading content from websites [reminiscent of Sunrise, which I used years ago for offline content reading with my old PalmPilot] was quite nice. It’s also an option for some of the open formats. But bottom line, it will not do the crypto necessary for the DRM in the epub standard. So, I caved and installed the software on my wife’s laptop.

I had a couple of problems with my first purchase from the Waterstones’ website. The file you download  when you pay for the book seems to be a stub that the Adobe software, Digital Additions, then uses to haul the actual book content down with. The problem I had was an error in the payment process: the payment was being rejected consistently. The workaround was easy: launch Digital Editions before buying the book.

So for the long term usage perspective: I’ve churned my way through about four books in the last 3 weeks, and I am loving it. We’ll be going on holiday in just over 3 weeks time and it will really come into its own.

Sony eBook Reader

The book comes with a CD of 100 titles that have lapsed into the public domain. I’ll read the Celtic Fairy Tales – one day :-).