Welcome to another Good e-Reader Video! Today, due to user demand, we have made a new video that shows off how PDF books look on the Sony PRS-T1 e-Reader! We demonstrate how simple, complex, and user loaded PDF books look and function.
Not only do we show you how PDF books look on the Sony T1, but also magazines and newspapers purchased from the Sony e-Reader store!
I found through my experiences that books loaded on the e-reader, be it complex or simple, did not look very good. The big problem with complex images such as saved or older newspapers is that the font size is way to small. When you try and increase the font it screws up the magazine layout. Simple PDF files with minimal graphics actually look really good. The drawback is when you turn the pages there is almost a 15 second delay. This makes reading self-loaded PDF files almost a non-factor.
Magazines and newspapers in the Sony Store look amazing! Considering this is a six inch e-reader the content from the Sony store is optimized towards the smaller screen. You have a full table of contents and a tremendously easy to navigate format to bring up all of the articles contained within. You can change the font size but cannot actually change the font displayed. Page turn speed is really good and the pictures can be pinch and zoomed in order to enhance the size of specific images.
Now you may be wondering, why do PDF magazines and newspapers from the store look and function so much better then content you load in yourself?
When we were at the e-Reader Conference 2011 in San Francisco there was an opportunity to speak with various magazines and newspaper publishers. Kno and Zinio both told us in an exclusive interview that they have developed custom tool-sets to convert existing content to be optimized for their platform. Most of the time magazine and newspaper companies develop their issues in Adobe Indesign. These raw files are then put through a custom conversion process, often automatically to conform the content towards a specific device, screen size, or OS.
Sony has developed a custom tool that allows content it sells through its store. It converts all the files that the publishers send them and makes them look really good on the T1.
In the video below we document everything I mentioned in the article and visually explain it all.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
