Of course, reviewing the Sony PRS-505 when you live in the UK is tremendously unfair. Denied the Kindle, the 505 is the only e-book reader that's easily available to us. So, if you're in the market for this sort of device, it's the 505 or struggling with eBay.

And indeed, the 505 had a number of terrible flaws, which I describe below. But despite this, I'm happy with my choice.

Let's begin with flaws.

Firstly, it's under-powered, taking over a second to turn a page, but that's par for the course with the current state of e-ink displays. What's really galling is when it does anything harder, like check it's internal memory for new books. If, like me, you have a few hundred books on it, then every time you sync it (whether you added books or not!) you have to sit there for over a minute watching the hour-glass go round, waiting for it to re-index the SD card.

Secondly, no keyboard means no way of annotating books, or searching for text. You can jump to a given page number, and use a table of contents if one is defined, but otherwise you're stuck with reading sequentially. You can't flick through a book on this device.

Thirdly, like all e-ink devices apart from the Kindle DX, if you load it with normal PDF files designed for printing at standard sizes, the text is too small to read. You can have it just show the text, and this kinda works, but you loose all the formatting, and in most cases the point of having a PDF.

Fourthly, I am yet to find an e-book store for it that sells to UK people and doesn't suck. I'm serious, the official partner e-book store from Waterstones was built by someone who has NEVER BOUGHT ANYTHING ON THE INTERNET EVER. As much as I hate DRM, that was a minor inconvenience in buying a book for my 505 compared to the endless hell of trying to comprehend an e-commerce site that doesn't have a text search.

But Biglig, I hear you cry, the 505 supports EPUB,which is an open standard, surely you can buy from WH Smith or Barnes and Noble, or from the publishers direct?
Well, I could, except that NONE OF THEM HAVE EVER USED THE INTERNET EITHER. Seriously, if I hadn't mostly bought this for reading books from Project Gutenberg, I'd have thrown it in the bin in disgust before now. iTunes showed us that, well designed, DRM can be philosophical, not a practical annoyance, but I have not yet found a single UK e-book retailer whose webpage doesn't make me want to immediately go onto IRC and start stealing books.

And lastly, it's a Sony, with all that entails. Tthere are three shops in the UK where you can buy one. Waterstones only have it in Silver. John Lewis also have it in Red. I wanted Blue, so I went to the Sony Centre. Their own shop, only selling Sony product. And indeed, they had *heard* of the blue model. They'd never seen one, of course, because Sony had never sent one to any UK Sony store, and had no idea where you could buy one. They'd seen a red one though. In John Lewis.

I just have to repeat that. I am in a Sony Store, with money in my hand, trying to buy a Sony, and all the helpful staff can say is "Yeah, I'd like a Blue one too. Let me know if you find one."

But set those negatives aside, and consider the positives.

The e-ink screen is crisp and clear and you can read for hours without eyestrain. To old men like me, this is welcome but not new, since we started reading e-books on devices like the Palm III (with it's 2 bit grayscale LCD display!). But it is the single most comfortable screen to read I've ever seen. I have o read dull technical manuals at work sometimes: I've copied them all to the 505 because it's more comfortable than printing them out.

The device is perfectly sized. Lighter and smaller than a real book, yet easy to read and holding (with a cheap 2Gb SD card popped in) hundreds and hundreds of books. Books that are professionally formatted in EPUB or BBEB format look beautiful, and the other formats it support, while often ugly, are always readable. Another feature for old men is that two presses of a button makes the text large enough to read no matter how bad your eyesight is.

There's a vibrant community behind it, formatting free books to fit and contributing to open-source management software for the device like calibre. (See my post in tips and tricks below.)

Would a Kindle be better? Maybe. A decent book store would be a big plus. The extra bulk would be a big minus.

In the end, it's not like I have any choice, since I inconveniently choose to live outside America. This may not be the best e-book reader you can get anywhere, but it's adequate, and if you love books like I do, then even an adequate dedicated e-book reader is a revelation. I have 700 books in my pocket, without needing to squint at an iPhone screen. I've never had a second's doubt that I was right to purchase this.