Sony Reader PRS-505 and tips to locate eBooks

The other day as soon as I started Pidgin I received an IM from a friend of mine. It was something he wrote while I wasn’t online, so it popped up immediately. The sentence was “Hardware description languages turn me on“. Shocking, I know. But he is a geek. By now you shouldn’t be surprised if you found out that I’m one too. It’s one of the many silly conversations an average geek has every day. But back to the story, I mention this because it was him that brought to my attention the little device that gives title to this post some months ago. It looked cool, but I wasn’t really in the market for new gadgets so I mostly forgot about it.

That was until last week. And yes, it finally arrived on Monday.

I know it wasn’t long ago when I said that I wouldn’t probably have an eReader for a long time. But what can I say. I read a lot. And as noted, I’m a geek. So it was pretty much something bound to happen.

This eBook-reader isn’t as nice as the iRex Illiad but is way less expensive and still has some pretty decent specs. And it looks cooler too. It supports some formats, including PDF which is a must-have given the amount of PDFs in my collection. It also has a good battery life of around 7500 page turns if audio reproduction is not enabled. These things use e-Ink, so energy is used only when the page has to be rewritten, not while you are actually reading the page. And the display is very readable even under direct Sunlight. Good luck trying to do that on a PDA.

I have a fairly nice collection of eBooks, both technical and non-technical, in a variety of languages. I was actually worried with PDFs not displaying non-Latin alphabets, but I tried it with some texts in Arabic and, apart from not showing the titles at all in the general book-listing menu,once a selection was done it displayed with no problems. Some English PDF also show an incorrect title, so I’m not really sure if it is related to the language or to a problem with the files.

Anyway, I’m quite happy with my new toy. I’ll probably do a lot less bookbinding from now on, but I’ll be reading much more to compensate.

By the way, there are thousands of eBooks freely available on the net, so I’m quite sure I won’t be using the proprietary BBEB Book format supported by the PRS-505. Some useful links are GNU Press, Wikibooks and Project Gutenberg.

And here is a quick tip. You can use Google to look for tons of eBooks. For example, if you were interested in Unix books a search string like this one would do the trick:

-inurl:(htm|html) intitle:(“index of”|”last modified”|”parent of”) + (“ebook”|”ebooks”|”book”|”books”) + (pdf|chm|doc|txt|zip|rar|djvu) + unix

Happy hunting! I’m going to bed to read now ;)