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Sony Reader Touch Edition

Added another gadget to my collection, I recently got my first dedicated ebook reader - the Sony Reader Touch Edition PRS-600.

With a whole slew of new ebook readers hitting the market (with new announcements at CES) and the growing popularity of the Amazon Kindle (now available in Canada) why did I pick the Sony device? Well a number of reasons, firstly it's the only one I've been able to get my hands on and try before making a purchase, I find the device is good size, solid, with good build quality, although may be a little on the heavy size. I was tempted by the smaller Sony Pocket Reader but found the screen a little too small and I found the touch screen on the PRS-600 more intuitive.

The Amazon kindle looks like a nice device, but I was put off but the keyboard and the and lack of support for the epub ebook format which seems to be solidifying at the "standard" format outside of the Amazon eco-system. Amazon currently use a propriety ebook format which only works with the Kindle, I'm sure this closed eco-system does create a nice easy to use user experience, but I like to leave my options open for upgrading to a different device in the future and I don't want all my book purchases locked to a single vendor. I'm sure Amazon will have to move to support epub eventually, just as the Apple iTunes Store moved from AAC to MP3 for music downloads, even Sony (the master of propriety formats) switched from their previous proprietry .lrf format to now supporting epub as the primary ebook format.

I just started a separate site to record my experience with using my ebook reader and my search for finding good quality sources of ebooks (free and paid) at Where to get ebooks (wheretogetebooks.blogspot.com)

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