The last consumer-grade Sony e-reader, the PRS-T3, turns ten years old this week. Funny enough, plenty of these devices are still being used today. Sony had tremendous build quality for all of their products. The big selling points at the time were an online bookstore to buy digital content, physical buttons to turn pages of an ebook, the home button, and settings. When Sony shuttered their e-reader division, they sold all of their customers to Kobo, and Kobo implemented an update to swap the Sony Bookstore for the Kobo Bookstore. A few years later, Kobo announced all Sony readers were now EOL. These days, the only way you can read ebooks is if you sideload them onto the PRS-T3.
The Sony PRS-T3 features a 6-inch E INK Pearl e-paper display with a resolution of 1024×768 with 212 PPI, a full touchscreen and stylus input for highlighting and editing PDF documents. It does not have a front-lit display or colour temperature system. The colour scheme is piano black on the front and back platting. The buttons are rose gold, which stands out.
Underneath the hood are an ARM Cortex A8 single-core processor, 512MB of RAM and 2GB of internal storage, which can house around 1,000 ebooks. Luckily, there is an SD card capable of an additional 32GB. It is capable of connecting to the internet with the browser. There is also Facebook, Evernote and a drawing app for the stylus. It is powered by a 1,000 mAh battery. The dimensions are 109 x 160.0 x 11.3 mm and weighs 200 grams
Users can sideload in their own ebooks and support EPUB, PDF, TXT and FB2. It can also read ebooks purchased from other companies in EPUB and PDF. It would help to use Adobe Digital Editions to transfer these books to your Sony.
It was tremendously popular when it first came out, and people still use it today. The resolution was the best possible, and front-lit e-readers did not exist in 2013. You can read our comprehensive review to read a snapshot of what I thought about it at the time. For a modern take, Peter filmed a video, looking at it by 2023 standards. You can still buy this today for $329 from the Sony Reader Store.
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.
