- Average user rating: 2.5 stars out of 96 reviews Back to product review
- My rating: 0 stars
Full user review
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9 out of 9 people found this review helpful
4.0 stars
"great for people who hate latptops and need to read"
Pros: excellent screen, intuitive controls, coolness factor
Cons: sceen a little slow, lack of rss feeds (except those on the sony site)
Summary: Okay, I read the other reviews AFTER I got the reader...so I opened the box carefully fully expecting to take it RIGHT back to the store.
As a person who reads a LOT for a living (college professor), I've always wanted something that I could put the journal articles, student papers, references, books, reference websites...all into something I can Carry with me. Sure I can use a laptop, but I (like many others) hate reading on a laptop, and my Treo is too small (I've recently switched to a Blackberry Pearl..even smaller).
I experienced the same things others reported about the small font, and then thought..I wonder if I can just make the font bigger... I'm lucky to have Acrobat Professional, so I just told it to save as screen size 3x5 and remove the white space from the margins (simple to do, I'm not that good with stuff like that..trust me) and low and behold...big, crisp fonts on the screen.
A few minutes later, I'd downloaded 30 journal articles, 5 web books (right click with Acrobat professional will even convert the links into an acrobat file of the size I want) and now my sony reader is chock full of the stack of books, lecture notes, student papers, and articles I'd been carrying around.
Do I wish I could edit the documents? Yes! Do I wish the screen was color? Yes! Do I wish it had a back light? Yes..play movies? external speaker, wireless connection, make my breakfast, wash my car? YES YES YES...But hey..I does one thing pretty well..and that's one thing better than a lot of gadgets I've purchased.
I just wanted to address these few things for those who are concerned about the PDF support
- 3 replies to this review
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there are really good tools out there that do a great job of converting text based PDF's to LRF format. One such software is at: http://calibre.kovidgoyal.net. Will make the Sony product much more useful!
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There's a free tool called rasterfarian which will make your PDFs looks crispy sharp on the reader, with resizing enabled.
If you don't have adobe professional, you can just use rasterfarian.
The results of a PDF converted with rasterfarian can be seen here: http://hightech.afmag.net/the-sony-reader-prs500-and-pdfs-part-2.html -
Sorry, earlier I erroneously left this comment in the spinoza2 string. The problem with Acrobat Professional is that it costs more than the ebook and unless you are a writer the investment is not justified. Can't Sony include in its software the save/format feature described by ken30307? That would clinch it for me.
Where to buy
Sony PRS-500 Portable Reader System:
$4.06 - $6.84
| store | price | in stock? | rating |
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$6.84 | Backorder |
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Amazon.com Marketplace
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$4.06 | Yes |
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