With all the books that Teal and I have, we have our own private library and this doesn’t include all the books that we’ve given away.  I keep looking at the book shelves in my office and noticing how much space we’ve taken up plus every time Teal goes on a trip she buys at least 2 more books.

So I decided that an ebook reader would be better, not only can it store a number of books, the ebooks are cheaper than the printed versions, but the best thing is that it’s less impacting on the environment.  So after researching different readers I settled on the Sony Digital Book over Amazon’s Kindle.  The main thing that I liked was the fact the Sony Digital Book could read many different formats as I’ve heard the Kindle was kind of limited.  Plus the look of the Kindle was not appealing and the extra features such as wireless and subscription to some news services were not interesting to me.

Priced at $299, I think it was worth it plus I like the fact that Sony was offering 100 free classic novels which basically cut $200 off the price so in a sense it was only a $100 reader.  Having used it for a couple of days there are a few of things that I don’t like about it.  First is the slowness in changing pages, as it takes time to refresh and I can be impatient sometimes but I’ll have to live with it.  The other thing is the zoom feature which I guess is OK if the document was formatted for the reader but we tried to upload a tech document and needed to zoom in a bit and it didn’t zoom very well.  I can’t complain about that too much, again the document was not formatted for the reader, but I’ll try their instructions on formatting a document to fit the reader and see how that turns out.  But what I really miss and it may be that I haven’t found out how to do this but I like the ability to go to a certain page instead of having to turn each page individually.  Once I bookmark the page then I can go directly but I kind of wish I had that feature.  I kind also wish there was a light feature so I can read in the dark but that’s not too important as it’s bad to read in the dark anyways, besides I think they want to make a few extra bucks as you can buy an attachment for it.

But besides the few things that I don’t like about it, I have to say that I’m quite impressed with it.  The display is very crisp, light doesn’t reflect off so I don’t get any glare.  The buttons are ergonmically in a good position for me so changing pages is very easy.  Internal storage is 192MB which according to Sony can hold about 160 books, but the fact that I can use an SD card and/or Memory Stick Duo is great which means Teal can have her books on her stick while I have mine on my own.   Another feature that I like is the fact that the Digital book can also play music and display photos.  For me, sometimes a little bit of music is needed after straining my eyes, plus viewing pics is something I like even though it shows them only in Gray/White and not color.

Overall I’m pleased with my decision, the cheaper ones were just that cheap too me, the Kindle is great but not for me, but the Sony Digital Book was just right for me.  Teal likes it so in the end that’s all that really matters!