Sony Reader

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COURTESY OF SONY

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I found it easy to buy and download books from the Connect store, where you can use the $50 store credit you get when you buy the pricey Reader. Even loading up PDF files and Word docs through the Connect software went smoothly. The trouble was that I couldn't figure out how to zoom in to actually read the PDFs I loaded, and the Word docs, which are converted into the universal rich-text format files during upload, aren't always framed right, and sometimes don't load at all.

The bookstore might work well on a technical level, but with what it offers it's still really more of an airport book kiosk than a full fledged Barnes & Noble. During random searches, the major works of Joseph Heller, C.S. Lewis and J.K. Rowling were all missing. The only Harry Potter book I found was If Harry Potter Ran General Electric, written by "business speaker" Tom Morris. It wasn't a total wash out, however: all of the published installments of George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series are in there, and for reasonable prices: $5.59 for the older three, and $14.36 for the one that's still in hardcover. Dog master Cesar Millan's Cesar's Way was at the top of the bestseller list for $14.96, followed by The Devil Wears Prada, by Lauren Weisberger, for $7.96. (Amazon.com sells each for a few pennies more, and can't deliver them as fast as a broadband download.) Finding some books is difficult, and editorially the store needs better organization: I found Ruth Reichl's Comfort Me With Apples under Reference and a right-wing diatribe called 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America under Science & Nature.

What I'd like to see are more educational titles, and at some point a partnership with the publishers of high-school and college text books. If, for no other reason, the back-breaking load of books kids bring home (or fail to bring home) might be lightened. Besides, kids aren't going to have a hard time with an e-book reader replacing their good old hardcovers. To them, a book will just be how people read in the era of the long-playing vinyl record.

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