The Sony Reader is an e-book reader. It uses an electronic paper display developed by E Ink Corporation that has 166 dpi resolution, eight levels of grayscale (16 in the PRS-2121 model), is viewable in direct sunlight, requires no power to maintain a static image, and is usable in portrait or landscape orientation. The reader uses an iTunes Store-like interface to purchase books from Sony Connect eBook store. It also can display Adobe PDFs, ePub format, personal documents, blogs, RSS newsfeeds, JPEGs, and Sony’s proprietary BBeB (”BroadBand eBook”) format. The Reader can play MP3 and unencrypted AAC audio files. e-Book & Literature.

Formats supported

DRM-free Text: BBeB Book (LRF), PDF, TXT, RTF, ePub. Typefaces in PDF files formatted for 216 x 280 mm (8.5 x 11 inch) pages may be too small to read comfortably. Such files can be reformatted for the Reader screen size with Adobe Acrobat Professional, but not by Adobe Reader software. The Reader does not directly support Microsoft Word DOC format. The ‘CONNECT Reader’ application uses Word to convert the .DOC files to RTF before sending them to the Reader.

DRM-protected Text: BBeB Book (LRX); Secure PDF and ePub.

Audio: MP3 and DRM-free AAC

Image: JPEG, GIF, PNG, and BMP (Loading an animated GIF will freeze the Reader)

RSS: Limited to 20 featured blogs such as Engadget and Wired, no ability to add others and no auto-update (as of 2006-12-01)

The Reader supports TXT and RTF documents with Latin character set only. Other character sets (such as Cyrillic, for example) are not displayed correctly, but Cyrillic patches are available for Russian users. Sony Customer Support have confirmed that units sold in the US only work with Latin characters (as of 2007-03-02). More about Sony Reader.