The menu system is easy to understand and although deeply nested, the Menu button (bottom right of the screen) always takes you back a level. Books can be browsed by title, author and creation date (date added would make far more sense), and can also be grouped into ‘collections’. Pages can be bookmarked with a single click while reading, but the last opened page is always saved for when you return to an unfinished read. Bookmarks can also be browsed, complete with an excerpt of the appropriate page – handy if you’ve marked a page in a textbook for later reference, but can’t remember the book it was in.

Its image quality may be impressive, but the PRS-505 Reader isn’t the most flexible e-book reader we’ve seen when it comes to displaying e-books. The three font sizes are sufficient for eyes of all ages, but there’s no option to change the font, line-spacing, margins or justification – all are dictated by the ebook itself. On a similar note, nor is there a backlight for night-time reading, but while this seems like a missed opportunity for such a gadget, the PRS-505 Reader is no different to a real book in that respect – and the matte screen is just as legible in artificial light as it is in broad daylight.

Of course, an e-book reader is only as good as the e-books you can read on it – and we’re talking quantity, not quality, here. US PRS-505 Reader owners get to buy all kinds of reading material from the Sony Connect online store . UK owners have no such luck and the ‘eBook Store’ link in the Sony eBook Library (a manager application for ebooks, images and audio) just points you at the so-so selection at the Waterstone’s site.

As it turns out, UK owners won’t be missing much and Waterstone’s ebook prices are just as outrageous as those at Sony Connect. In other words, if you thought that the lack of materials, manufacturing process and distribution network would make ebooks considerably cheaper than their physical counterparts, you’re in for an unpleasant surprise.

At the time of writing, the best-selling fiction ebook at Waterstones (China Dreams, by Sid Smith) had a list price £1 higher than that of the paperback at Amazon, but a special introductory offer means you can buy it for 80p less. The next two best-selling ebooks, however, both cost rather more than their paperback editions, special offers notwithstanding. And so it goes.

Unfortunately, there’s little recourse from the ugly greed of digital booksellers and publishers, since the PRS-505 Reader only supports two protected ebook formats – ePUB and PDF. More and more commercial ebooks are being distributed in these formats (with Penguin being the latest to go digital), but you still won’t be able to avail yourself of the wider selection and more reasonable prices from stores like FictionWise. Well, not without some effort on your part, at least – there are free tools to convert other, more popular, open and protected ebooks to a Reader-compatible format. Calibre and Convert LIT are two must-have tools, and the MobileRead site is stuffed with good advice for PRS-505 owners with less money than sense.

We’ll give short shrift to the PRS-505 Reader’s ability to play MP3s and display photos – it works, but they're useful extras rather than a must-have features. What should prove more tempting is the price. Now compared to the price of a typical paperback, £200 may not seem like such a steal, but it is pretty good in ebook reader terms – Amazon’s Kindle available costs $359 (around £190, though you can’t buy it in the UK), while the cheapest Irex iLiad Reader costs £389.

The PRS-505 Reader isn’t the ‘iPod moment’ that ebooks need to enter the mass market consciousness, but it’s the best effort we’ve seen to date. It ticks a lot of the right boxes for an ebook reader and as long as you’re prepared do a bit of work on your reading material before you actually get to read it’s the best device of its kind – at least in the UK.

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