Customer Reviews
The best Reader for readers 
2008-05-11
I just upgraded from the old Sony Reader to this new one and I love it. It's faster and there's no ghost-text anymore. There's even a helpful alphabetized table of contents now.
I've had some eye problems (convergence insufficiency), but I love reading so much and I can't stop (probably not helping the eye strain). This was absolutely perfect for me. It's simple and does one thing well. I don't plan to use it for music or pictures, even though it has support for this. I don't even use the Sony library, because I think it's a rip-off. Every book is pretty much available for free on the Internet. There are tons of torrent sites and even e-Libraries that have free book checkouts. Online-literature and Project Gutenberg has classics. No one needs to buy books anymore, and this may be my last purchase from Borders Books. Menus are a bit slow, but it's livable with. There are only two things wrong with it, but the major one is easily remedied.
1. There is no backlighting. I wouldn't mind to read this in the dark, but if I can't no big deal. It's not like I can read books in the dark normally, and it would be a huge battery drain and bad for my eyes. Update: I got the Reader clip-on light off the Sony Style website. I love it; great flex neck and pretty bright. Very nice button placement and it doesn't turn itself on in my handbag. I don't know about the battery life yet, but mine came with spares (CR2032). Update: It broke within days :\, but fortunately they're only ~$12.
2. The software involves a lot of work. The interface is nice, and a bit reminiscent of iTunes in its syncing. You can get a pretty good guess at what it will look like on the Reader screen, but expect it to be smaller than it is on your computer. There is drag and drop for files, but it has to be over the Library or Reader sidebar buttons. Update: It's really easy to read full screen on your computer and manage bookmarks and collections.
However, two things piss me off about the software. First of all, you can't change the author/title in the software, and I'm a huge stickler for electronic organization. However, in Word, you can change them. Since I use OpenOffice, I just went to the code for RTF files (just open an RTF in Notepad) and added a line of code after \info... {\author authornamehere}{\title titlehere}. So that wasn't too bad. For PDFs, you can download free software such as PDFInfo. But, PDFs are bad for the Sony Reader for the following reasons.
First of all, you only have the options of small and medium for PDFs. And PDFs tend to appear smaller anyways, so you typically need the large for them. You can just increase the font size on your computer, but I realized that makes the files huge and lags your Reader. The people that complain of ridiculous page turn times were probably using PDFs.
You can convert from PDF to text easily in Adobe Reader. From there, you can open it with Word/OpenOffice and save it as an RTF. Use what I said above to get the title name right. It depends on the person, but I like my text to be giant. At Arial 20 point font, it's perfect, especially on Large. And I learned from another review that holding down the Size button turns everything sideways and makes it bigger.
Update: I found a fix to the annoying PDF formatting/paragraph wrapping issues! Selnick makes a free downloadable program called SmartWrap. It fixes all of your text so that there's no weird wrapping, and it's really easy to use. After a few uses of the trial version, you have to delete a pre-printed sentence at the top, but that's a non-issue.
Randomly, for some books, quotation marks and hyphens will be replaced with square boxes, and even if it's annoying, it's not that distracting. Too much dialog isn't a sign of a good book anyway. I'll update again if I figure out how to fix it. It can't be detected in the Preview screen of your eLibrary.
I just discovered Collections, which are absolutely amazing. You can organize virtual bookshelves and put books in various categories extremely easily. This is great for accessing books for different classes or of different genres, especially when you start adding a lot of short texts or poems.
Long story short, I love it. Just download free eBook torrents, convert everything from PDF to txt, and then open your text in Word/OpenOffice and save it as an RTF. That should reduce any Sony-store-and-page-turn-lag-related stress.
Great Device! Am reading 5 times as much now! 2008-05-03
Great device from Sony.
Reading is very easy and natural, doesn't hurt eyes, very comfortable, quite enough screen size and contrast (although, I'd wish white background in the future release) and very nice navigation.
Got it about 3 weeks from now and already read more with it than within whole this year.
Recommend to every book lover.
Downloads 
2008-05-01
Would be interested to know whether there are any other stores where you can download digital books that can be viewed on this device. Is one able to download Kindle books to a Sony?
I bought the 505 and the selling store ommited to tell me that one has to have a US credit card to download books.
An expensive placemat! If anyone can help I would be most grateful.
Amazing Little eBook Device 2008-04-26
Opening
I am going to be moving in the near future. As I was looking at some massive piles of books that were cluttering my room, which would surely cost a lot of money to ship a few thousand miles from Hawaii to Maryland, I thought it might be about time for me to make the jump into eBooks. With that in mind, I went and bought myself this amazing little machine; the Sony Portable Reader System (PRS-505).
Screen
First thing I would like to write about is the screen on this device. The PRS-505 features a 6-inch, 170 ppi resolution, 600x800 pixel, 8-level grayscale E Ink electronic paper screen. Technical jargon aside, this screen looks great.
For those who are not familiar with the E Ink electronic paper technology, basically it is a means of mimicking the appearance of paper on a electronic screen without the use of backlighting; saving battery power. The screen will display one an image of the screen and the image will remain on the screen without using any additional power. If you wanted to, you could display the same image on the screen indefinitely without charging the battery.
Button/Input Layout
I really like the button layout and the layout of various inputs are positioned in a smart way. Flipping through pages is easy. There is are buttons on the right side of the screen or buttons to the bottom left of the device that you can use, depending on how you like to hold the device. min and out is as easy as pushing a single button. Marking bookmarks is that simple s well. Volume buttons, USB, power and headphone inputs (as well as a little slot for a wrist strap) are on bottom of the device, giving easy access to them when you have the include leather book cover on. Power button is on the top of the device along with the SD and Memory Stick Pro Duo slots. The number button on are the side of the decide, which are used for assigning content and jumping to a specific page. Going to page 364 in a book is as simple as hitting `3-6-4-Enter`.
Other Features
Along with the primary feature of reading books, the PRS-505 as a numerous of other features. The Sony Reader does have the ability to display images (JPRG, BMP, GIF and PNG format). Pictures are obviously not displayed in color, but still are very detailed. It also can display text (LRF, PDF, RFT and TXT, as well support for DOC files, which are converted into RFT). It also has the ability to play audio files (AAC and MP3). I have some classical music loaded on my Sony Reader which I like to listen to when I am reading, which works great.
Ease of use
It is a very simple device to use. The eBook Library software makes it very simple to load up books, files, pictures, or audio onto the device. I have it setup right now so each time I plug in my Sony Reader, it will automatically sync any music and book files I have added to my library. You can turn off any setting you wish in that respect. You can tell it to sync all files, some files or no files.
The eBook Store content is easy to navigate and easy to purchase. I have already bought and downloaded a number of books. If you happen to accidentally delete any content from your computer, getting that content again is as simple as logging in and redownloading your purchased content from your Transaction History (no charge of course). You can also have your purchased content on a total of 6 authorized computers or Sony Reader devices.
Closing
I am very happy with my purchase of the Sony Portable Reader. I would highly recommend the purchase of it to anybody who likes to read or anybody who might read more thanks to this convenience.
The REAL Truth about PDF files on SONY Reader... 2008-04-21
Sony Reader handles PDF's blindingly fast if the PDF includes a proper table of contents. If the PDF is created without a table of contents then of course the result will be much less efficient than it could be on this or any other reader.
HERE's THE PROOF...
I took a dense 1500 page book and formatted it with MS Word to suit the Sony Reader (with a bigger font) creating 8,000 smaller PDF pages optimized for the Sony Reader.
Then I used Adobe Acrobat Professional to create the PDF, instructing it to process ALL tags (default is NO tag processing). The PDF creation process took 1 - 2 hours but the result was incredible.
THE RESULT...
Using the Sony Reader I can now find or reference any part of this HUGE text FASTER than using an actual printed version of the text.
It's beautiful and it works great!
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!!!
Do your eyes and the forest a favor and get this product. 
2008-04-06
Holds up to 160 books / 8-Level Gray Scale Panel / 170 Pixels Resolution / 6" Screen Size / Dual SD and Memory Stick(R) Pro Duo Expansion Card Slot Audio and picture playback Dual SD Card and Memory Stick(R) Pro Duo Explansion Slot Mountable USB Drive Charges via USB
Excellent reader 2008-04-02
I have owned my 505 for several months now, and I love it. For those that have raised complaints about 64 bit and Mac compatibility and the general ineffectiveness in the Connect software - I agree. I too had the same problems, but solved them by downloading a community supported peice of software named libprs500 (google it). It works with PC, Mac and *nix including 64bit. Also you can convert various formats of books into PRS accepted formats, and you can also use it to fetch various newspapers and periodicals for viewing on the unit.
With the expansion card I have several hundred books installed. Enough to keep me occupied for a very very long time.
Amazing Little Gadget 2008-03-28
I am a bookworm and always have a book with me. I've been known to pull it out and read while standing in line at the grocery store. This digital reader allows me to carry even the heaviest hard cover new-release with me without throwing out by back! I love it. Its easy to read, operate, download books. The Sony eBook store is easy to shop at. I give this product at least 5 stars!!
My favorite toy! 2008-03-28
I told my husband that *this* is what I wanted for Valentines Day. No candy, no flowers. It is fabulous. The screen makes the experience as close as you possibly can imagine to reading a printed page. I adore mine.
Quite nice, and a good promotion for 2008 2008-03-25
I just received my Reader this morning and immediately went to the CONNECT ebook website to start loading it with books. Anyone who registers their Reader before 9.30.08 gets 100 free classics! Since I had a list of about 45 classics I was going to download, this was a great bargain for me. I have spent the last hour or so reading the Sony Classics copy of "The Three Musketeers."
The device is slim and user-friendly. I was a bit irritated that the page-changing button is on the bottom left (intuitively I felt it should have been on the bottom right), but then DH pointed out that I could use the buttons on the side (left and right arrow keys about halfway up the right side of the device) to change pages, and that's much better. The e-ink screen is better than I'd expected. In our office with the blinds closed I can still read perfectly well.
The CONNECT website hung a few times (notably when I was searching on an author who turned out to not have any books in the store), but a quick ctrl+alt+delete took care of that. Everything is fine now.
I also tested the addition of .txt files by downloading "The Vicomte de Bragelonne" from Project Gutenberg and it's fine (although PG is loaded up with all that legalese text at the beginning).
The Sony versions of the classics have a few minor typos but for free, who cares? They tend to be typos such as a word having a space in the middle ("D'Artagnan disap peared through the doorway").
All in all, I'm very pleased that I'll be able to carry so many books on such a small device.
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