Sony Dgital Reader Day 3…
This product is not perfect, far from it. But it's not the hardware that makes me say it, it's the software. Everything about this product is soooooo first generation.
But moving on, my main problem is that this product can in no way support an entire library of books. And by library I mean thousands and thousands of books. This wouldn’t be a big deal except that it’s advertised as such and it’s assumed as such give by the theoretical storage capacity.
The hardware is pretty nice, despite some flaws. But the software is fucking horrible. Despite the fact that the reader can support an SD Card and Memory Stick, it looks like the designers never truly meant for the device to have more than 200 MB of books both in form and in function. Many people have had issues when using the device with more than one thousand books loaded. But even if you could deal with some of the device issues, the library software is horrible for maintaining that many books. Sony would be very smart to just license itunes (with its bloated code and all) for the Digital Reader.
So I’m forced to resort to 3rd party apps. And if you think a digital reader is a niche product, you should see the 3rd party app that are available for it. They are either in foreign languages, buggy, or scale poorly for larger collections of books. One program which is actually pretty nice in concept, but it uses a humungous chunk of ram when presented with a large number of books.
But library quantity is not the only issue. It also appears that they did not intend for books to be huge in size. The device insists on loading the entire book into its memory, which for something like Count of Monte Cristo or War and Peace can take a somewhat long time. And to make it worse, you rarely getting a loading screen or prompt when it's trying to load a very large book. You will if it’s trying to format the book, but not if it’s just loading it. Why they couldn’t do it for both I do not know. The device just sits there as if you didn't press any buttons, which makes you feel like you should press more buttons, but that just compounds the problem.
But all that is livable. Use smaller SD cards, keep the bulk of your library on your computer, realize that it’s trying to load, etc… Here is my biggest issue, which sadly I can not blame on sony…
Using a pre existing library of books is a major pain in the ass. Why? Because almost all of the books that I currently have are not formatted for this device and look horrible when just throw on to the device raw. Almost all of them must be processed in someway, which involves manual time and effort. No one method for formatting will work on all books.
Example: Many books will display excess returns when formatted on the device, you can get macros to remove those returns, which works great….except for books with a lot of dialog…which jumbles all the dialog together making it difficult to read.
Granted I could just buy the ebook (assuming it’s available), which I might consider if the prices were cheaper. But since most are not any cheaper than their real life counterparts I’m resistant to. Not to mention, I already have it, why should I pay for it again?
So where does that leave me? Well despite all the negative things I’ve said, I love this device. I have so many books on computer that I have been resistant to read because of the form factor. Now that problem is gone and I’m beginning to read them one by one. Yes I’ve had to change my perception of this device, to related it to the Ipod…it’s not an Ipod Classic or Nano, but more of a shuffle. Load what you need, store it some place else, which each book needing a good look over before loading.
Concept: ****
Device: ***
Software: *
Execution: **