Downloads
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
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...
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!!!!

Niche Product? Feedback please
Hello, I've read a few reviews going one way or another for these type of products.
Don't you think the market is a quite exclusive for a product like this? I would have one, infact I was looking to grab one but lack of pdf support and
perhaps one of those digital writing pads integrated would have sweetened it for me, but why do i have this horrible feeling I'm missing the point?

Best reader in everyway
First of all, it was extremelly dificult to to find the product in the amazon.com site. I searched as "Sony Reader PRS-505" and couldnt find it. I imagine that Amazon doesn't want competition with the Kindle.
After extensive research and reading of product comparisons, I decided to buy the Sony vs the Kindle and I am pretty happy. The support of PDF files is clearly a big advantage. The fact that you can sincronize from the PC (ala iPod+iTunes) makes it a very attractive usage model. The Kindle is bulkier and unless you want to make extensive annotations in ebooks, the keyboard is a feature I can live without if I get a sleeker and lighter device.
The ebook store works reasonable well. differently to the iTunes store, it is blocked in some corporate intranets, but nevertheless, the store is pretty friendly. One feature I love is that you can donwnload your books as many times as you want, given that only 6 devices are authorized at the same time.
Some people will pick one vs the other considering different elements. Available titles (Sony nor Amazon have disclosed figures re: number of readers sold or number of titles in the catalog, but I assue amazon has an advantage) vs a cooler (and in my view) a better design in the Sony reader (something recognized by the Amazon staff, when they tried to make it very hard for you to find and buy the Sony reader in amazon.com).
I would love Amazon to offer support for both devices, this will greatly move us towards a standarization of the ebook formats. As with MP3, I don't see any reason why both devices can't support both formats, but only time will tell. In the meantime, I will enjoy my Sony reader waiting for a BIOS update that allows me to buy ebooks from amazon.com

Rgds.....e