I’d thought I’d post a little ditty about ebook readers, I’ve had one for a while now and thought I’d post my experiences.

Firstly my ereader is a sony pocket reader (prs-300) and to be honest its not a useful as I thought it might be. I had looked around before I bought it and understood that the technical diagrams might come out a bit funky but the issues I have with the device are more substantial than that.

The pocket reader seems to be only actually of use for say novels, that is to say a large amount of unformatted text, which technical manuals do not have. As you know tech books normally have maybe a paragraph or two like that then it’ll have boxout’s and diagrams which normally normally go hideously wrong on my pocket reader, also when you turn to a page that includes a picture of some description the time to process and display that page increases dramatically to 15+ seconds which is a lifetime compared to turning the pages of a book.

As a side note if you have the page size set to small then the formatting of the pages is generally acceptable however the font I am quite sure would be far too small for anyone to read at a comfortable distance.

Speaking to other IT bods a good ebook reader for technical manuals is the kindle DX as it has a much larger screen than mine so can display a properly formatted page at a decent font size. So I think I may be putting mine on ebay and saving up for a DX which at the moment I think is available in the UK.

If you want a pdf reader for technical manuals or anything that does not consist of one large block of text then a Sony Pocket Reader is not for you.

UPDATE: I’ve had a Kindle DX for a few months now and I must say I love it, its so much better than the smaller sony I’ve had (much quicker too), a great feature is the ability to email PDF’s to it which is useful for all those whitepapers and vewndor guides that you pick up along the way.