Rui CarmoThe Reader is Sony’s take on the LIBRIe for the Western market, with a few twists.
I bought a PRS-505 on January 2008 for a number of reasons (not the least of which was my wanting to spend less time online), and eventually upgraded to a Kindle.
Good Points
- Build quality - Lightweight metal casing on most devices
- 160dpi screen
- Charges via USB
- Takes RTF as an input format directly
- Loads and loads of utilities for it
- Good contrast (PRS-505)
Bad Points
- Original devices had an incredibly asinine DRM-laden format (later changed to EPUB)
- No wireless connectivity on most devices
- PDF crashiness on older devices
PRS-505 Notes
- Page size for PDF printing: 9 x 11,7 cm.
- Max picture size is either 11 cm high or 8 wide, 8 bit gray, 166 dpi.
Resources
| Date | Link | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 2026 | Cobalt | SDK for building apps for Kobo eInk readers |
| 2010 | Sony Reader Daily Edition reviewed, unworthy of cost premium or love | Not that hot, then. |
| Sony cuts e-reader prices, Pocket Edition now $149 | The heat is on. | |
| 2009 | Sony counters Kindle with new models, better format support | Nothing significantly improved over the 505 as far as I’m concerned. |
| chm2pdf | Extract .chm files and convert to PDF (also available as an Ubuntu package). See also archmage and extract_chmLib for viewing and extracting raw HTML from .chm files. | |
| Sony Launches Another e-Reader, with 3G! (People Might Want This One) | Seriously now, I keep wondering what’s the hangup with competing directly with the Kindle in the US when there are actually more people reading in Europe. | |
| Sony Attacks Amazon’s Kindle with $399 3G Digital Library Book | ||
| PRS-505 information | Detailed specs and links to additional resources | |
| Sony eBook Library now available for Mac, Windows | The desktop software is not nearly as impressive as Calibre, and buggy. Also, the new hardware display seems blurry, even though the annotation feature is neat. | |
| Sony Reader Pocket and Touch editions lower cost of entry, online e-book store follows suit | ||
| Video - Sony PRS-600 Touch is fast but too dim to satisfy PRS-505 owner | Figures. That’s one of the reasos I bought the 505 originally - readability when compared to the 700 | |
| Video - Sony Reader Touch Edition gets touched, desktop software upped to 3.0 | ||
| Sony Reader Pocket Edition available now | Only took them about a month. I wonder when the bigger model will be hitting Europe. | |
| Sony offering ePub upgrade / trade-in program for PRS-500 e-reader | Nice of them. I’d swap my 505 for one of the newer ones if they had a trade-in program as well, but the likelihood of that happening and reaching Portugal is near zero… | |
| Sony's 3G-enabled Reader Daily Edition up for pre-order, content deals coming next month | Well, by the looks of it I’m not going to get one this Christmas for sure. Once Sony figures out Europe exists, though, I’ll get right on it. | |
| Sony Reader Store goes 100% EPUB on Friday | Sensible. I wonder if there will be any firmware updates for the 505… | |
| Sony e-readers get exclusive Dow Jones, New York Post content | I really need to look into upgrading from the 505. | |
| Sony Reader Daily Edition starts shipping, gets more newspapers | All we need now is for Sony to remember Europe exists. | |
| Sony Reader PRS-505 Disassembly | ||
| PRSCustomizer | A tool that generates a custom firmware image for the Reader, enabling some tweaks. | |
| 2008 | Engadget | |
| PRS-700 internals and disassembly | Some info and links on the newest model. | |
| Hands-On | ||
| Gizmodo | ||
| BargainPDA | ||
| Shots of the production hardware | ||
| InfoSync | ||
| FAQ | ||
| PCMag video review | ||
| Quentin's notes | Might come in handy. | |
| libprs500 | Python-based library for content conversion |
Notes on Low-Level Conversion Tools
For generating an optimized PDF out of a .chm file:
chm2pdf –charset iso-8859-1 –webpage –no-title –no-toc \
–fontsize 8pt –headfootsize 7pt –size 9x11.7cm \
–top 0.2 –bottom 0.2 –left 0.2 –right 0.2 in.chm
For doing the same for EPUB (provided you have the Calibre tools installed):
extract_chmLib in.chm folder
html2epub folder/final/main.html