Sony: UK ebook shop open for business Sony UK has rolled out an e-book shop it hopes will tempt buyers away from Amazon and Apple's iTunes, the company said today. The Reader Store UK - to give it its official moniker - offers the usual array books and bookshop features, plus a couple of daily papers: the Mail and the Guardian. Sony Reader Store It's already …
I also have the PRS-T1. The store isn't that great yet - too few books and too expensive - but it's the Reader PC software that really gets on my nerves. It's terrible, with a pretty piss-poor user interface, missing options all over the place, and it doesn't handle sync properly. It assumes that its copy is always right, not the reader's, and you can imagine how that goes.
My biggest irritation is that I was stupid enough to create some collections on the reader from the PC software, as that kind of massive multiselect thing is always easier on a desktop. Collections you create on the desktop are locked on the reader - why?? I then got a new laptop, installed the reader software, and it refuses to synchronise these collections back! So now I have collections on the reader that neither the device nor the PC can edit. Someone needs a slap for that.
In fairness, the one thing it does do really well is updating the device's firmware - that was absolutely painless, just a notification and one button to click. I'm just glad that I applied the Android hack to my T1 immediately after getting it, so I have Kindle installed. Some of my stuff comes from there, and the rest are independently bought ePubs/PDFs from elsewhere on the net, copied via the filesystem directly to the device's /media directory. If Sony want me to use their store instead, they're going to have to try a lot harder.
Shame it's a bit useless though. I thought I'd compare a few prices from the Kindle shop, as I wouldn't be averse to buying from someone else if they could compete, but unfortunately as well as not having the majority of the books I was interested in, those that they did have were no cheaper anyway. Bit pointless, then.
My complaint is that a company is gaining advantage by abusing the varying VAT rates in the EU. Whether that rate is reasonable is an entirely different, but valid, argument. Basically it's down to the governments to sort out the very broken tax system that companies are running rings around. The only upside is that at least Amazon is passing on the saving rather than keeping it for themselves. I suspect that won't last once they've nailed down their monopoly.
OK, I have both a Kindle and a T1. This was to avoid paying top dollar by being restricted to single stores.
Big fail. For example, Neal Asher's The Departure - Sony price £10.19, Kindle price £5.03
That's not a VAT rate difference, it's just rank profiteering!
The new reader store is simply a web page. It has none of the slickness of either the normal T1 book reader interface or even of decent android browsers.
The search is clunky, text input is appalling, navigation is pathetic.
Getting books from Kobo isn't brilliant compared to Kindle books, but it's a lot better than this rubbish system!
Is this really the best Sony can do? Did they really sit down and all agree that this product was *finally* ready to launch? Jeez I hope they can improve this. They'll have to.
Still not found anything cheaper or even same price on sony store
extra gripes have arisen though ...
The web pages give very little feedback and the buttons are not very responsive at all.
For instance, the pages need the buttons to be clicked to turn not a swipe of the screen and these are the on screen buttons at that!
I also have a slightly older PRS-350 - small 5 inch touch screen reader. So all the new T1 has really is a bigger touch screen over the 350. Hell, I could have simply got a 650 for that!
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