Review: Sony Pocket E-reader & Free Books

Image via WikipediaI was one of the early lovers of e-books, back when you would use a PDA to read them.  The convenience just blew me away.  At that time, I was using a Sony Clie which was nice and compact and was back lit.  When that finally died after a few years Sony was no longer making them so I ended up going with a Palm.  All well and good and I kept upgrading.  Unfortunately, Palm and Windows decided not to play nice with each other so when I left XP behind, I could not longer sync my ebooks.  Just not kosher.  I gave up my beloved e-book even though I still had about 400 on my computer that I hadn't read yet.


Well now the rest of the world has jumped onto the bandwagon since Amazon came out with their Kindle.  I finally couldn't resist my desire to go back to my e-books.  I did a lot of research and the one downside that I kept coming across was that none of the e-readers were backlit.  Now that was a feature that I truly loved as reading myself to sleep without having to get up to turn the light out is a true luxury.  And I didn't particularly want one with a touchscreen because I don't care for all the fingerprints on my screen.  I finally settled on the Sony Pocket Reader 300.  The reason that I decided on the Sony is that the Adobe Digital Editions was designed with Sony in mind.  And well I get a lot of books from Net Gallery to review and they use that software for their DRM editions.  Also with a Sony one can check out e-books from the library.  How cool is that?


So far I have been very pleased.  It is slightly larger then I prefer but I have a funny feeling that most people won't find this an issue and in fact would probably prefer it.  I just remember my Clie fondly which was small and light enough that I would read in lines in the grocery store or DMV.   With Calibre, a really nifty piece of software, I am able to download and enjoy all formats with the exception of kindle books.  And I am loving all the free books that you can download from the various bookstores.  In fact, at the bottom of the post I have included some links for ones I found today.

I rate this a 4.2.

Free books from Borders

Barnes and Noble




Kindle (yeah I read these on my phone)



Have a great day and brightest blessings!