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.