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| <title>Kevin Boone: They | ||
| don’t make them like that any more: Sony PRS-500 e-reader</title> | ||
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| <h1 | ||
| id="they-dont-make-them-like-that-any-more-sony-prs-500-e-reader">They | ||
| don’t make them like that any more: Sony PRS-500 e-reader</h1> | ||
| <p><img src="img/book_logo.png" class="article-top-image" /></p> | ||
| <p>I bought my Sony PRS-500 on the very day it appeared in shops in the | ||
| UK. This was September 2006, I recall, at least a year before the first | ||
| Amazon Kindle hit the UK’s shelves.</p> | ||
| <p>The PRS-500 was a revolutionary product. In a review at that time, I | ||
| wrote:</p> | ||
| <blockquote> | ||
| <p>It’s about time somebody produced a gadget which combined the | ||
| advantages of computer technology (high storage capacity, rapid | ||
| searching) with the advantages of real paper books (easy on the eyes; | ||
| straightforward user interface; low power consumption).</p> | ||
| </blockquote> | ||
| <p>Leaving aside the rather odd implication that printed books had “low | ||
| power consumption”, I think I captured the novelty of e-ink e-readers. | ||
| Of course, e-ink displays are two-a-penny these days. You can even get | ||
| e-ink badges for conferences. It’s just not an exciting technology in | ||
| 2024.</p> | ||
| <p>But, as a person who read novels on a Palm Pilot, I found the PRS-500 | ||
| remarkable. It was the first device I owned with a screen that worked | ||
| even direct sunlight, so I could read in the back yard, or on the beach. | ||
| E-ink screens uses no power to maintain the display, only to change it. | ||
| So the PRS had a battery life of about one full novel to a charge. This | ||
| was a radical improvement over any backlit LCD display, then or since. | ||
| It is mostly these features – daylight-readability and long battery life | ||
| – that continue make e-readers attractive nearly twenty years on.</p> | ||
| <p>But the PRS-500 had something that modern e-readers lack: real | ||
| buttons you could push.</p> | ||
| <p>The basic format and capabilities of an e-book reader have scarcely | ||
| changed since 2006: even if you weren’t born then, you’ll recognize the | ||
| PRS-500 as an e-reader, just from its construction.</p> | ||
| <p><img src="img/prs-500.jpg" class="regular-inline-image" /></p> | ||
| <p>You’ll see from photo that, unlike a modern Kindle, the PRS has a | ||
| heap of physical buttons. Kobo e-readers still have a couple of | ||
| page-turn buttons, but the latest Kindles have no buttons at all. It’s | ||
| possible to operate the PRS one-handed, and the modern Kobos can at | ||
| least turn the page, but I’ve never figured out how to do even this much | ||
| with a modern Kindle. I’ve been told that the generally-accepted way to | ||
| turn the page on a Kindle, when you’re holding it one-handed, is to tap | ||
| the screen against your nose.</p> | ||
| <p>Of course, the PRS-500 had to have physical buttons, because | ||
| touch-screen e-ink panels did not exist at the time. Nor did | ||
| front-lighting, which is commonplace in modern e-readers. If you wanted | ||
| to read the PRS in the dark, you had to use a flashlight.</p> | ||
| <p>The PRS-500 had an SD card slot, which turned out to be crucial, and | ||
| (naturally) a slot for Sony’s proprietary memory cards. It was almost | ||
| the same shape, size, and weight as the contemporary Kobo Forma. In | ||
| fact, the weight was academic, because we all kept our e-readers in | ||
| stout protective cases that weighed more than the devices. Twenty years | ||
| ago, we wouldn’t have risked using these expensive devices without a | ||
| case.</p> | ||
| <p>The PRS-500 wasn’t Sony’s first e-reader, although it was the first | ||
| to have any kind of commercial success. Sony so crippled its forerunner, | ||
| the <em>Librie</em>, with DRM and copy protection that it was almost | ||
| unusable. To be fair, the early Kindles had the same problem; but Amazon | ||
| got away with it, while Sony didn’t, because they had such a huge | ||
| catalog of books. Kindle owners didn’t have to seek out and install | ||
| books from other sources.</p> | ||
| <p>While Sony did have an on-line store-front, it offered far fewer | ||
| titles than Amazon’s. Restricting the Librie to Sony’s limited catalog | ||
| was not a winning strategy.</p> | ||
| <p>The PRS-500, however, moderated Sony’s DRM policy; a good thing, | ||
| because Sony’s store-front did not even extend beyond the USA for the | ||
| first year after it released the PRS-500. Owners could install DRM-free | ||
| books in several different formats, including RTF and plain text. This | ||
| made the whole of the Gutenberg collection available, as well as content | ||
| scraped from websites and converted. It continues to amuse me to see | ||
| Kindle owners paying hard coin for public-domain books by Dickens and | ||
| Austen, when they could just get them from Gutenberg.</p> | ||
| <p>Unfortunately, as a Linux user, I found the PRS unsatisfactory in a | ||
| number of ways. It used a proprietary USB protocol for installing files | ||
| so, although the PRS could handle documents in several formats, you | ||
| couldn’t get them onto the device. Linux users could still copy files | ||
| onto an SD card, and then install the SD card in the reader; but this | ||
| approach came with certain limitations. In particular, we couldn’t | ||
| organize files on the SD card into collections. There was also a general | ||
| suspicion – one that I was never able to test fully – that using the SD | ||
| card for storage reduced battery life.</p> | ||
| <p>But the most bizarre problem for a Linux user was that it never | ||
| became possible to charge the PRS over USB from a Linux computer – some | ||
| secret code was needed to enable the internal battery charger. Only | ||
| Sony’s Windows software could provide this code. This wasn’t a | ||
| show-stopper because Sony supplied the PRS with a separate battery | ||
| charger, but it was a limitation that had no business existing, even in | ||
| 2006.</p> | ||
| <p>The PRS had an internal memory capacity of only about 100Mb, but that | ||
| was sufficient for text and RTF novels – a user could fit more books | ||
| into memory than the device could manage, given its clunky user | ||
| interface.</p> | ||
| <p>At the time of launch, the PRS-500 attracted mostly negative reviews. | ||
| A year later the first Kindle, despite being a less capable device, with | ||
| all the same technical limitations and more, was mostly well received. | ||
| Partly, I think, this is because Amazon had the content-purchasing part | ||
| of the ownership experience all worked out. Sony’s store was fiddly to | ||
| use – even where it was available – and never had even close to the | ||
| number of books that Amazon’s had. But I suspect that, by the time | ||
| Amazon released the Kindle, consumers had become more receptive to | ||
| e-readers in general. Even the latest and greatest e-readers are poor | ||
| substitutes for a real, printed book, but we now see the advantages. In | ||
| 2006, reviewers saw mostly the disadvantages.</p> | ||
| <p>Like all early e-readers, the PRS-500 suffered from ‘ghosting’, where | ||
| a page turn leaves a faint after-image of the previous page. This | ||
| continues to be a potential problem with e-ink technology, and the | ||
| Kindles didn’t handle it any better than the PRS.</p> | ||
| <p>A bigger problem, perhaps, was that the PRS-500 had a quirky user | ||
| interface, and navigating within books was pretty awkward. I suspect | ||
| that some of the apparent illogicalities of the user interface resulted | ||
| from Sony’s attempts to accommodate the limitations of the e-ink | ||
| display. Redrawing the screen took a second or more, which made it | ||
| difficult to implement a conventional, menu-based interface. So, even | ||
| though the PRS included an audio player (with a headphone jack), I was | ||
| deterred from using it by its hostile user interface.</p> | ||
| <p>Sony did go on to release new PRS models, with larger, | ||
| touch-sensitive screens and back-lighting but, in fact, none of the | ||
| models had much commercial success. The PRS-505 fixed the stupid | ||
| limitation in USB charging, so it could be charged from any USB port or | ||
| charger. This version also made it possible to copy document files | ||
| directly to the internal storage, rather than forcing users to grapple | ||
| with the proprietary Windows software. The PRS-505 was the first | ||
| e-reader that was straightforward to use with Linux.</p> | ||
| <p>By the time Sony had released these improved models, they were in | ||
| direct competition with Amazon, and before long they also had to compete | ||
| with Barnes and Noble and Rakuten Kobo as well. With hindsight, though, | ||
| I have to wonder whether Sony really had its heart in e-books? They | ||
| certainly didn’t seem to fight very hard to keep that line of business. | ||
| Amazon <em>did</em> have its heart in the battle, and pushed its Kindle | ||
| products agressively.</p> | ||
| <p>The PRS appealed to geeky readers for the same reason that the Kobo | ||
| readers do today: you could find and install your own content, without | ||
| using the vendor’s store-front. The PRS-505 was compatible with Linux, | ||
| even though the PRS-500 had been problematic. But reading is a | ||
| relatively mainstream activity, and I doubt that ‘geek appeal’ alone | ||
| would have kept a product alive – not in the face of such intense | ||
| competition. What was needed, and Sony never had, was an extensive range | ||
| of affordable books, and a straightforward way to buy and read them. | ||
| Barnes and Noble had that; even Kobo had (and has) it to some | ||
| extent.</p> | ||
| <p>In the end, Sony pulled out of the e-book market in 2014, after only | ||
| eight years. They abandoned a technology that they had made | ||
| comparatively mainstream without much fuss or notice.</p> | ||
| <p>These days, the original PRS-500 isn’t much use to anybody, but the | ||
| PRS-505 remains a useful e-reader, which can be picked up second-hand | ||
| for a few pounds. There’s no on-line store-front, but it remains | ||
| possible to copy DRM-free books to it in many formats, including EPUB. | ||
| But, best of all, the physical buttons are just so much nicer to use | ||
| than an e-ink touch-screen.</p> | ||
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| <span class="last-updated">Last update Dec 09 2024 | ||
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