Sony is offering current PRS-500 owners the option of trading in their ereader for $50 off the purchase of a Reader Pocket Edition purchase or $75 off a PRS-600 Reader Touch Edition purchase. Or, if you want to keep your PRS-500, they have a firmware update to give it support for ePub format books. This is the format that the newest eBook readers are starting to standardize on. It will also add the Adobe DRM format and add the ability to re-flow PDF documents. Unfortunately, the downside is that you have to ship your reader off to Sony to perform this upgrade. The upside is that they are will pay the postage. One motivating factor for taking advantage of the free update is that without it, starting in mid-December, PRS-500 owners will not be able to transfer new content to their device. For more info check the Sony upgrade page.
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I have the PRS-700 and I love it. Very cool. But check out the Barnes and Ignoble’s coming next month. Might be a better unit.
I am watching the Barnes & Noble Nook. I want to see one in person in order to compare to the Sony PRS-505 (or whatever model that has 5-inch screen). One thing that I don’t like about the nook is not the reader itself, but the prices on eBooks: I made some comparisons and eBooks prices on the Sony seems to be lower.
Where are you buying ebooks? At this point, if they both support epub, you should be able to use the same stores for both. (With the qualification that only one will be deeply-linked, so that you can use it from the device directly.)
The only really odd-man-out at this is the Kindle, which has it’s own propriatary format. (It supports a couple others, but no other real ‘ebook’ formats.)