Battle of the ebook readers: Sony PRS-505 Vs. Amazon Kindle 2 DX

HKW — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 18:56:15 +0000

“Ebook readers? Pah. I prefer reading on toilet paper.”

That’s what a friend of mine said a year ago, and recently, he, like many other people, are starting to come around to the benefits offered by ebook readers like the Amazon Kindle and the Sony 505.

Having recently purchased a Sony PRS-505, and absolutely in love with it, here’s a brief head-to-head smackdown over my decision making process between the Sony PRS-505 and the Amazon Kindle 2.

Let’s assume you can get your choice of the Kindle 2 and the Sony 505. What are the advantages and disadvantages of each? Here are 8 features compared between the two.

1. The Amazon Kindle 2 has loads of books available – nearly 300,000. Of course, you have to get them from Amazon. There are a number of newspaper and magazine subscriptions available for the Kindle, as well as blogs, such as Boingboing, TechCrunch, and SlashDot. Stats on the Sony 505 are not as specific: there are “thousands” of titles available directly from Sony. But more importantly, it supports PDF well, and Google has about half a million free books that are in the public domain, so this was a big selling point for me.

2. The Kindle 2 supports AZW proprietary technology as well as MOBI, as long as you have software called Calibre to put it in that format. Calibre is open source. Conversion of other formats to AZW costs $0.15 per megabyte (about 9p) if you get Amazon to do it for you. For some, this may be an issue. The Sony PRS-505 on the other hand, supports the following formats: LRF, EPUB, PDF, TXT, BMP, RTF, JPG, AAC, MP3, PNG, and GIF.

3. The Kindle 2 has a larger screen and a keyboard. The Sony is slimmer overall and does not have a keyboard. But do you really need a keyboard on an ebook?

4. The Kindle 2 has no expandable memory. Extra storage is on Amazon’s servers, for download when you need it. The Sony supports memory expansion with SDHC memory sticks.

5. The Kindle 2 has 6 different font sizes, while the Sony only has 3-4. There are 3 levels of zoom on the Sony, which works well in general, but could be an issue for those wanting to zoom better.

6. The Sony takes a little bit more time to refresh when turning pages. Personally this doesn’t bother me too much.

7. The Sony has slightly better screen contrast, which is great for reading outdoors, and glaring sunlight.

8. The Amazon Kindle is only available from Amazon.com with a U.S. credit card and a U.S. shipping address, so getting your hands on one in the UK is going to take some fancy footwork including calling in those favours your American friends owe you. You could also try eBay, and pay the extortionate markup.

Is it worth it? Remember that to download content in the UK from Amazon, you will first have to download it to your computer, then drag it over to your Kindle with the USB connection.

Finally, it’s not so easy to say which one comes out as the winner. It depends on how you feel about things like proprietary formats, supported data formats, and availability of content.

The winner in my book: The Sony PRS-505

Bottom line is that if you’re in the UK and you’re in a hurry, go with the Sony. The history of e-readers is new enough that it isn’t clear whether the better strategy is to sell the books and provide the technology to read them, or to sell the technology with the hope that enough content will soon be available to make it a worthwhile investment.

If you have any experience with the Amazon Kindle, the Sony PRS-505 or other ebook readers, please share your thoughts/opinions in the comments below!

Hong Kong Wong » sony

Battle of the ebook readers: Sony PRS-505 Vs. Amazon Kindle 2 DX

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