A new gadget from Sony guarantees you’ll never run short of reading material again.
by Mark Spoonauer
We’ve been hearing for some time now that books, magazines and newspapers as we know them will soon cease to exist. So why, the last time you checked, were you still lugging the Sunday Times, the latest bestseller, a month of New Yorkers and, of course, your well-thumbed copy of Corporate Leader onto the plane? The fact is, as unnaturally attached as you may be to your BlackBerry and new iPhone, there is no way you’re cozying up with The Age of Turbulence on a two-by-three-inch screen.
Stop the presses. In one of those oh-my-God-would-you-look-at-that tech moments, Sony has brought the vision of the electronic book to full-scale, tactile, bendable life. The most advanced of a few new such products (Amazon also has one), the Portable Reader System 505 ($349; sonystyle.com) comes with a six-inch gray-scale display as crisp as freshly inked 24-pound bond. The selection is also a little better than the terminal news rack; Sony’s Connect eBookstore has 20,000 titles to choose from (plus plans to start offering your favorite CEO magazine and other periodicals as soon as it surmounts the final technological hurdles to a color display). The equivalent of 160 books can be packed into the third-of-an-inch-thick device at a time.
You can also use your e-reader to peruse all sorts of other documents, including PDFs, Word files and RSS feeds, as well as digital photos. Still need more stimulation? The Portable Reader even has a built-in MP3 player, though using it does cut slightly into the e-reader’s epic battery life of 7,500 pages per charge. In that case, you might only get through Greenspan’s opus and Black Hawk Down — and have to save War and Peace for the ride home. CL