By Joyce Pellino Crane
I’m blessed and cursed with one nearsighted and one farsighted eye.
Last month I read books on Amazon Kindle and Sony Portable Reader in an effort to contrast their features. It was—if you’ll pardon the expression–an eye-opening experience.
Due to the refractive error in my eyes, I found the electronic books to be easier to read than a printed page. But I also discovered that I’m not quite ready to pay the steep price of owning one.
The Sony PRS 505 model that I reviewed sells for $269.99 and the Kindle is priced at $359.
Each has unique features that make them worthy of consideration. The Sony’s design, for example is far superior to the Kindle’s, but the Kindle’s wireless accessibility to Amazon’s enormous database of books, magazines and newspapers, makes it the winner.
The Sony Reader is a thin, lightweight, elegant device inside a leather case that looks and feels like a book. The six-inch display offers three point sizes in black letters on a grey background. This high contrast, high resolution technology by E Ink is designed to emulate a printed page. Given that my eyes do not work together regardless of whether objects are in the distance or nearby, anything that helps reduce eyestrain is a Godsend.
Kindle also offers a six-inch, E Ink display on grey background, with six increasingly larger point sizes.
Unfortunately, neither model had an internal light emitting diode for reading in the dark. I found this disappointing, but later learned that the newest Sony model offers it.
Kindle is clumsy and less ergonomically efficient than the Sony. The device sits loosely in a protective case. Because it’s not secured, it falls out frequently. But worse, the keyboard below the screen takes up so much space that there’s no room for resting your thumbs without accidentally pressing a letter key, or the “next page” or “previous page” button while you’re in the middle of reading the current page. The experience can be exasperating. In addition, I found the scroll button on the right side awkward and clunky.
By contrast, the Sony is securely fastened to its case and has such a realistic feel that it is a joy to hold. Most of the operating buttons run along the device’s right edge leaving plenty of space at the bottom for resting your thumbs. There is no accompanying keyboard because with no wireless connection, it’s not needed. The page buttons are perfectly positioned, making the experience pleasurable and relaxing.
But here’s the rub. Despite it’s beauty and user-friendly design, the Sony requires you to download books from your computer. The process is as irritating as updating an iPod, which, over time, I have found to be cumbersome. The user manual provides directions for transferring computer files to Sony’s memory card, but after doing so, I couldn’t locate where the files went. Kindle, on the other hand, made the process simple. I established a Kindle email account and then attached my computer file before emailing it to the Kindle address. The document immediately showed up on my device’s home page.
Using the Sprint wireless network, Kindle connects directly to more than 200,000 book titles at Amazon.com. That means you can download from anywhere on the Sprint network. Even better, it also gives you 28 national and international newspapers to purchase, 21 magazines and journals, including Newsweek, Time and the Atlantic, and almost 1,200 blogs on such subjects as business, the arts, humor, and culture.
The Kindle charges no monthly fee nor does it charge for downloads.
So while Sony offers a genuine book-reading experience, Kindle is a few steps ahead on the technology front.
If Amazon fashioned Kindle more like the Sony Reader, it would be unsurpassable. However, until the price comes down, I’ll stick with downloading audio books from the library.
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