It seems the must-have device of Christ­mas 2009 was the ebook reader. I’m see­ing an explo­sion of infor­ma­tion and happy post-Christmas reviews.

I myself was excited to find a Sony PRS-600 Touch Edi­tion with my name on it under­neath the tree, thanks to my won­der­ful part­ner Dave. To be hon­est, I hadn’t shut up about them for months and the size and shape of the pack­age was about right, so I was pretty sure that’s what it was. Con­se­quently I’d been plan­ning my book pur­chases already.

I used to read a lot of fic­tion – ten years ago I used to absolutely devour books, often mul­ti­ples at a time. But the inter­net did some­thing to my abil­ity to read books. I was read­ing so much online every sin­gle day, for both my job and for plea­sure, that when I did switch off the machine the last thing I felt like doing was pick­ing up a book. A neck injury also meant that read­ing phys­i­cal books – say, in bed, where I used to read a lot – became more of a has­sle. And read­ing on screen just got more and more com­fort­able and nor­mal. I started read­ing ebooks a lit­tle, first on my Pocket PC and then later on my tablet. But the “user expe­ri­ence” of read­ing on a ded­i­cated device that’s easy on the eyes is far supe­rior to those.

So why the Sony Reader, and not the cheaper and more pop­u­lar Kin­dle? Excel­lent ques­tion. Firstly, while there’s no doubt that Ama­zon have the biggest ebook store on the planet, I don’t like the idea of being lim­ited to just one source for my books. The Sony sup­ports EPUB, the open ebook for­mat, as well as PDF and a whole ton of other for­mats, and you can load it up with books from any source. In fact, the only major ebook for­mat it doesn’t sup­port is Microsoft’s LIT for­mat – a shame because I already have a (small) num­ber of books in LIT for­mat that I was read­ing on my tablet.

Sec­ondly, there’s the issue of actu­ally get­ting books onto the reader. Rather than requir­ing it’s own wire­less provider, the Sony Reader con­nects up to your PC via USB and you can copy stuff onto it. No mat­ter what they say about wire­less providers and the inter­na­tional Kin­dle (check out the wire­less cov­er­age map of Aus­tralia here), I can’t get a reli­able 3G con­nec­tion on my own phone in my own liv­ing room, so I’m much hap­pier with the sync­ing option. For a geek i think that’s the ideal sit­u­a­tion, although it might not be as good for the less-computer savvy.

Also, there’s the touch screen. I haven’t used the sty­lus or note tak­ing fea­tures much yet, but flick­ing your fin­ger to flip pages is very cool and a very nat­ural move­ment, much more so than using the but­tons at the bottom.

Another pretty cool fea­ture on the Sony Reader is expand­able mem­ory. It sup­ports Mem­ory Stick – no sur­prise there, it’s a Sony prod­uct – but also SD card, which is great because I have a ton of them lying around for my cam­era and camp MP3 player. So I could put together “libraries” – a tech library, a “cur­rent read­ing” fic­tion library, a clas­sics library, what­ever – on SD cards and have a ton of stuff on close standby when I travel.

Before I get too gushy, there’s also the seri­ous side of pri­vacy and DRM. The EFA have released a com­par­i­son of sev­eral of the major ebook play­ers on var­i­ous pri­vacy issues which makes for inter­est­ing read­ing. Basi­cally, if you use a reader that’s closely tied to one of the stores, they’re going to be able to track your pur­chases. They also include the Google Books ser­vice which is not an actual hard­ware device (at least not yet), but the pri­vacy impli­ca­tions of that are more than a lit­tle scary.

As for DRM… I’m going to save that rant for another day. I pur­chased a title that uses Adobe Dig­i­tal Edi­tions and the process was a painful albeit inter­est­ing one. I’ve also ditched the Sony soft­ware (as much as I’m able, any­way) in favour of Cal­i­bre, a great open source book­shelf man­age­ment package.

For the moment though, I’m absolutely lov­ing the screen, the ease on the eyes, the con­ve­nience of read­ing on the device… the over­all expe­ri­ence has been fan­tas­tic. Highly recommended!