Although more than half a year has passed since I had updated my PSR-505 (at Jan. 4th) I’d like to translate some of my notes made at the time so that to extend review made earlier here.

With firmware 1.1 update Sony Reader had received several major improvements. As it is was announced in official release:

• Support for EPUB file format
  
• Support for Adobe® Digital Editions 1.5 or later and Adobe DRM-protected content
  
• Enables text within PDF eBooks to be «reflowed». This will enlarge the text and improve the readability of text-based PDF’s
  
• Support for SDHC memory cards that have a capacity of more than 4 GB
  
• General fixes to improve stability and performance

Now speaking of all this from usability point of view. First of all there was great improvement in performance, gadget finally stopped lagging and became fast as it should be. At last there’s just nothing annoying, real ease of use.

I don’t know how about general version, but SDHC cards were simply ignored by my PRS in firmware 1.0. And support of that standard added to overall performance as well: faster loading from flash-card.

PDF has become a readable format as pages can be zoomed and text is reflowed. Although it was a pain previously it’s not much better now. Many .pdf files are composed in such a way that no text is rendered (INSecure mag. is a good example), and when multi-columns pages are met when trying to convert such files, you get textual noodles.

New icons were introduced: larger, simpler, better.

And, well, I’m not using EPUB, but open format support is a good sign.

Overall

Firmware 1.1 was a major improvement and all new books come already patched with it. That one is also the latest. Here’s the link where new firmware can be checked easily on official site (if any update will ever be implemented).

A few days ago I've purchased Sony Reader (PRS-505). Summarizing its pros and cons I can say that's a great device.

In details. First of all it's small enough to fit in my pants' pocket. It's not tiny and almost as big as DVD-box. So the screen is of a good size to read.

Technology used to render visuals on a screen is something as innovative as paper was. As it doesn't emmit any light it provides good reading experience. Classical displays' type of light source irritates my eyes and that is the main reason I've always preferred 'hard' books to ebooks. Now when light problem is solved I can read as much as I want from ebooks.

Design of a gadget is somewhat great. It looks like a classic note book with leather cover. UI is pretty simple and there are paging buttons for both right and left hands.

Provided software is easy to use and have much in common with iTunes but enhanced slightly.

There are however some mistakes and problems. One of them: there's no buttons' locker and device must be turned off so that numeric buttons would not be pushed incidentely in a bag or a pocket.

Next. When picture is zoomed clicking 'right' on a selector turns out to slide to next image and not the right side of a picture.

There are some issues that devices hangs and needs to be reset after some synchronizations if you tried to access library too fast after a moment of disconnection.

At last there are hige problems with ebook formats. PDF files can be opened easily but they can't be zoomed and read beacuse of small font (as page is rendered completely as is in a file). This introduces a task of convertion (preferred: pdf -> doc).

Also .doc and .rtf files are rendered/formatted too slowly and this happens each time zoom scale was changed. They should better be formatted ti .lrf format (native format for Sony Readers). As direct doc -> lrf converters are hard to find, this way is preferred: doc -> fb2 -> lrf. With some manual corrections this way provides good to read formatted ebooks. One thing: standard fonts are rendered faster than custom ones.

Last thing to note: ebooks market is still very young and savage sometimes. But providing DRM mechanisms often makes things even worse.

I’ve just finished reading 3rd story by Joseph Conrad — “The End of the Tether”. There’s one good thing in his style noticed in “Heart of Darkness” and “Youth” as well: no morals are explained or referred to for reader. There’s no “big truth” or anything that’s projected from author upon reading mind.

There are atmosphere, people and their thoughts and actions. And these details are portrayed perfectly. No strained perfection, no subjective criticism. Not that I prefer just that kind of narration, but they provide more relativity to the mind than any picturesque novel can do.

And there’s one thing to add. The way these stories have been lined up in my mind as well as the very sense from the way author had built them reminds me of movies by Jim Jarmush. The only difference is that narration by the latter is hastier and more abrupt.