Kindle and Sony Reader toe to toe

The Kindle and the Sony Reader are both flawed products. They have version 1 written all over them.

And it doesn’t matter.

Get either one of them into your hands, and chances are you’ll be hooked. The convenience factor is sky high, far outweighing the rough edges and design disappointments.

So, how do the two compare?

Where the Sony Reader beats the Kindle:

• Price. They’re both overpriced, but the Reader’s $299 price tag is $100 easier on the pocket than the Kindle’s.
• Initial content. Sony sells the Reader bundled with a couple of hundred dollars worth of credit towards purchasing ‘Classics’ at its Connect eBook store. The ‘classics’ are neatly formatted versions of public domain ebooks – everything from the Aeneid to the works of Mark Twain. These books usually sell for two bucks a piece at the Connect store, and although you can find them in unformatted form for free, the formatting makes a big difference to your reading pleasure.
• Size. The Sony Reader is slim and ultra compact. It measures 6.9 x 4.8 x 0.3 inches. The Kindle is 0.6 inches longer, half an inch wider and 0.4 inches thicker. Both feel pretty comfortable to hold, but there’s no doubt those fractions of an inch give the Sony the edge.
• Looks. The Reader is smart and unobtrusive. Its black-and-chrome (all-chrome is available on the PRS-505) looks a whole lot smarter than the Kindle’s clunky white package. One thing, though: the Kindle is extremely unphotogenic; it looks much better in your hand than it does in its publicity pics.
• The cover. The Reader’s snug-fitting, click-on cover protects it at all times. If you find the black a little boring, you can dress it up with optional red or lime green covers. The Kindle, on the other hand, is ill at ease in its cover. You can’t read it with the cover on – its buttons are obscured (including the On/Off and wireless switches, which are both on the back) and it slips out easily. That means you’ll have it out of its cover - and unprotected - most of the time.
  
• Bookmarks. The Reader’s one-click bookmark button is much easier to use than Kindle’s clumsy dog-earing method.

Where Kindle beats Sony Reader:

• Book selection. The Kindle leaves the Sony Reader in the dust. A broad book selection is especially important if your literary diet goes beyond the bestseller list or the latest romance or mystery from the publishers’ darlings.
• Wireless downloads. This is more than handy; on the road, it’s essential. The fact that Amazon is picking up the tab for the wireless access - and that the Kindle contains a basic Web browser to boot - is the sugar on top of the cherry on top of the cream. Sony’s Connect Book store and software are horrible to use, with excruciatingly poor search capabilities and very slow response times. Getting content into the Reader is frustrating, and trying to organise it once it’s there is painful. In contrast, purchasing through the Kindle store is fun and fast.
• Page controls. Sony got this seriously wrong on its original Reader (the PRS-500), by placing its two sets of Page Forward/Page Back controls right above each other, on the left-hand side. This simply doesn’t work. If you take a look at the recently released PRS-505 (I’ll have a review of this new model for you next week), you’ll see that the page controls have been moved. The Kindle has page controls on both the left and right sides. They work perfectly when you read in a sitting position, enabling easy single-handed reading; they’re not so great if you like to read in bed. Shortening the right-hand control would improve bedtime reading considerably.
• Readability. Kindle’s choice of six font sizes is a lot better than Sony’s small, medium and large choices and the Kindle display is just a little bit crisper.
• Built-in references. The Kindle comes with the New Oxford American Dictionary built in, plus wireless access to Wikipedia. To use the dictionary, scroll to the line containing the word you wish to look up and click: the Kindle looks up every word on the line and displays the definitions. If the New Oxford is not your preferred dictionary, you can purchase another one and then use the Kindle’s settings to set it as the default dictionary for the device. The Sony Reader has no built-in reference tools.
• Search, annotations and highlighting. The Kindle lets you search across all your content, highlight passages and save them to a central My Clippings store (backed up on Amazon’s servers), and add annotations. That built-in keyboard may increase the size of the Kindle, but it has its payoffs.

The Kindle: Not cool, but hot

I passed the Sony Reader and the Kindle around the table at Thanksgiving lunch. Everyone loved them both and everyone thought the Sony Reader much cooler. But as soon as I mentioned that the Kindle was wireless enabled and showed them how that worked, the contest was over: everyone wanted a Kindle.

The Sony Reader has a lot going for it, but in-built wireless really is a killer feature. That Amazon picks up the tab, not only for access to the store (as it should) but also for basic Web access, makes it irresistible. The Kindle also beats out the Reader when it comes to book choice and the overall book-buying experience. The Sony Connect store feels like it was designed by book-buying dilettantes; the Kindle store has the Amazon book-lover stamp all over it. It’s a persuasive difference.

A word on formats

The Kindle and the Sony Reader each use a proprietary format for ebook content. Both devices also provide support for other text and graphics (and audio) formats, but the support is halfhearted.

You may have heard that the Reader supports PDFs while the Kindle doesn’t. That’s true, but getting PDFs onto the Reader in readable form is no picnic, and graphics, in any format, are less than satisfactory on both readers.

There are various workarounds available, including using MobiPocket Creator to convert PDF and Word documents to a usable form, but if PDF support is a must-have for you, neither the Reader nor the Kindle will make you happy.

Hands on with the Kindle and the Sony Reader

So, Amazon has finally released its ebook reader, the Kindle. Within 24 hours of its launch, there were a couple of hundred customer “reviews” of the Kindle on Amazon.com, the majority of them uncomplimentary and almost all of them written by people who haven’t even seen the Kindle, let alone used it. Despite the detractors, the Kindle sold out within a couple of days and people are now having to wait to get a Kindle in their hands.

I’ve been a long-term user of the Sony Reader and now have a Kindle resting in my lap. Which is better? Is either worth having?

The short answers: the Kindle and yes.

In the next few posts, I’ll expand on those answers.

What’s great about both readers

When I first started using the Sony Reader, I was not at all sure whether I’d take to ebooks. After all, they don’t have the heft, the page turn, the smell of paper-based books.

Seven months with the Sony Reader have turned me into an ebook devotee, without denting my love for pbooks. The thing is, it’s not an either/or choice: there’s a place for both types of books.

Although pbooks win on sentimental and tactile appeal and on the range of reading material available, there’s a lot to love about ebooks and the Kindle and Sony Reader:

• You have a library in your hand. Instead of loading up your bags with books when you travel, you tuck the ebook reader in your carry-on and lighten your load. You also don’t have to pick and choose which books you take with you – just take a whole bunch of them.
• Get new books when you want them, including in the middle of the night.
• The E Ink technology used in the displays is blissfully easy on the eyes. Readable on the beach or in bed (with a light). Because there’s no backlighting, there’s no eye strain, and the ability to change text sizes on the fly makes ebooks even more readable. The downside is that you must have a light source: you can’t read E Ink in the dark. It makes investing in a clip-on book light worthwhile.
• Automatic bookmarking. Switch your ebook on and it opens to the page you were reading last. You can have multiple bookmarks, too, so you can quickly jump to marked pages in any of your books.
• No dead trees. There’s the environmental impact of the materials in your ebook, the downloading of new content and battery life (remarkably long) to consider, but that’s a smaller footprint than the hundreds or thousands of pbooks you won’t be buying.

What’s not so great

We’re at the early stage of development for ebook readers. Both the Amazon and Sony products have a long way to go to deliver a completely satisfying experience. I have no doubt it will come, but right now it’s not here.

Some of the drawbacks to using the Kindle or Sony Reader:

• Lack of content. Amazon boasts about having over 88,000 books available for the Kindle; Sony’s Connect store offers a fraction of that number. It’s an atom in a drop in a bucket. Unless you restrict your reading to bestsellers and publishers fads, you’ll quickly discover how many, many books aren’t available in eformat.
• It’s all in black and white. There’s no colour support and the graphics capabilities are severely limited. That’s fine when you’re deep into the text, but you won’t want to read illustrated books, books with charts and diagrams, or any book where the design is an integral part of the reading experience. You miss out on cover artwork and photos.

What you might not expect

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos talks about wanting to make the Kindle “disappear”, so you don’t experience the technology, all you experience is the experience of reading. Surprisingly - especially given its clunky looks - the Kindle delivers. So, too, does the Sony Reader.

Which delivers the better experience? I’ll take a look at that tomorrow.

Up early

I’ve been trying to get this blog off the ground for some time, but life keeps getting in the way. Finally, I decided the only way it will happen is if I get up half an hour earlier each day and take that time to write, hence the title.

Oh, but no guarantees I’ll manage that early start every day. My plan is to post a couple of times a week, unless I’m deluged with interesting new things to write about.

Amazon Kindle & Sony ReaderRight now, I’m deluged. I have a couple of pieces of hardware burning holes on my desk that I’ll talk about in the next few entries: the Kindle (Amazon’s brand new ebook reader) and the Eye-Fi Card, a wireless enabled memory card for digital cameras. I’ve also been using a Sony Reader for half a year or so, so look for my head-to-head comparison of it and the Kindle in the next few days. (Click the image to get a look at the two side by side.)

For those of you familiar with the Geekgirl’s site, you’ll notice things look quite different around here. Geekgirl’s has been up and running since 1996 and looking pretty much the same since about 1998. I guess it’s about time I updated.

I’ll gradually be moving content across from the old site to this one, so look for an expanding list of sections in the navigation links on the right, and forgive the dust.