The latest generation of eBook readers from Amazon and Sony proves that, finally, the technology has come of age. They boast the latest E Ink screens with improved refresh rates, and a whole lot more besides. The Kindle, in particular, with its built-in Wi-Fi and 3G turns the consumption of novels into a totally new experience.
But there’s a hidden side to these eBook readers. They’re often used to consume dense, technical or academic material, usually in PDF format, and these documents are often awkward, containing diagrams, figures organised in tabular form and text organized in columns.
In the US the Amazon Kindle DX covers this sort of scenario perfectly, but over here you’re stuck with the smaller devices, so it’s critical that zoom features, text reflow and panning are easy to use. We’ve already noted in our full length review that the Sony Reader Touch PRS-650 does all this well, and better than the Amazon Kindle at that, but at the request of a handful of readers (human ones), here’s a more in-depth analysis and comparison.
Load a PDF document on each, click the zoom button and this is what you see. In the top image the Kindle offers a range of zoom levels but no typeface enlargement. Below it, the Sony Reader Touch provides three methods of manipulating your document: typeface enlargement options run along the bottom (XS, S, M,L, XL and XXL), a Zoom In button offers standard page zoom and pan, and to the right, Page Mode offers various ways of slicing and navigating a PDF page.
This shows the result of the Kindle’s first step of zoom – there’s clearly not enough granularity in the adjustment because there’s no setting that allows you to fit the text to the width of the screen. The result? You have to pan right to finish each sentence. It’s inflexible, awkward, and rules out the Kindle for the consumption of complicated PDF files.
The Sony, on the other hand, gives you a number of choices to suit a number of different scenarios. Above, we’ve enlarged the typeface one step. You can see the text now stretches the full width of the screen, and although the original formatting is lost, there are no awkward line breaks or spacing problems. It’s much more readable.
If you want to retain the formatting, simply tap the Zoom In button. A slider on the left-hand side of the screen lets you finely tune the zoom level. The Lock button at the top re-enables turn control while retaining the same zoom level, while other shortcuts offer simple fit-to-width and fit-to-height operations. If the text is still unreadable with the text stretched to the edge of the screen, the touchscreen provides a quick and simple way to pan around at closer zoom levels. Just hold your finger to the screen and drag.
That’s not all, however. The Sony also offers a number of shortcuts to make the reading and navigation of complex texts simpler. The page mode button offers five quick options, the most useful of which splits the page into four or six sub-pages to make reading column-based pages easier.
Choose the 2-Column Split and, as you swipe your finger across the screen left to right, instead of moving you to the next page the view moves from the top left position down in stages until the bottom of the page is reached, then up to the top right and down again until the bottom of the page is reached once more.
So there you have it. The Sony is a clear winner in this comparison, proving that the Kindle, though brilliant in most ways, certainly isn’t flawless.
